Dash Cam - anyone?
 

with people getting ever more careless on the road, the time has come to install a dash cam on old green for a little added protection. seems every time we hit the road, we run into at least one driver who is texting, talking on the phone, or just plain distracted for whatever reason. or they are just horrible drivers.

after looking into several different models available now, the g1w-c seems like the perfect option for a permanent install. it is a capacitor model (no battery), so it will be fine in the wicked texas heat. as such, with a permanent install, it will begin recording when powered on and continue for ~30 seconds after powering off.

have any of you here installed a dash cam? the plan is to attach it to the rvm, but would like to hear any suggestions or recommendations you guys might have. TIA.

Im interested in adding a dash cam as well. Fools around these parts are getting worse.
The influx of "undocumented" peoples does not help.

A few weeks ago...
On my way home from work...

A little cholo pulled out in front of me and started making erratic steering adjustments.
He was right beside me after he figured out how to keep it on the road...

The sucker started... i dunno if he was trying to get me to race his little bucking and spitting 4banger or what... but just as the 2 lane narrowed to 1, he floored it to whip around me...

Then he slammed on his brakes... stuck his hand out the drivers window in the shape of a pistol, and made some "cacking" motions at me.

I dont take to kindly to being threatened... by anyone...

This is precisely why anytime im in my truck... so is my trusty 1911.
Had the subhuman puke escalated the situation... i would have been left explaining why there was a dead cholo laying in the street. A dash cam would serve to confirm my account of the event with little room for doubt.

Wrecks and crashes? Eh... its usually my fault anyway lol.

same here, brother.

things are worse down here (200 miles south of you).

don't carry a gun (might use it), but definitely have a bowie knife in the center console and a hatchet tucked in between the driver seat and console... just in case.

I have 2 of the G1w dash cams and they are great.
I bought mine for 60 bucks from Spy-tec in new york. G1W 1080P HD Car Dash Camera

This thing works as it should. Here is a sample of my recording.
I use software to convert it to AVI and then a AVI trimmer to make it short for viewing. It records in 3 min segments and over wrights the older segments. You can lock a segment so not to delete

I've thought about getting a dash cam fro the idgets among us. Never been threatened with a gun strangely enough.

I have 2 dash cams in my daily driver. One in front and one in back. Both record to their own 32gb micro sd card so I have about 2-3 hours of storage. The files are in 5 minute increments and the oldest gets deleted for a new recording.

Cameras were bought off fleabay, they are about 20 bucks each.

I too have been researching dash cameras but there are so many out there I am at a loss. Also I want to stay below $50 and not take up alot of space on the dash or block the windshield.
Here a link with some reviews. Dash Cam Talk

This is not unlike the Bluetooth OBDII adaptors. The units under $100 are mass-produced, copied, and cloned in China. I'm not saying they're not worth the money, but it might be an annual disposable thing. It's probably just as well... the technology in the imaging industry is far too fast to encourage throwing real money down on something as basic as a dash-cam.

The G1W-C is the one with the capacitor - but that doesn't cover tampering or hit & runs. The A118 has better construction, but it's perpetually backordered. If you do get one that does motion recording while parked, the power hog versions will drain your battery. If you get one with a GPS, you can possibly get a deduction on your insurance - assuming it consistently demonstrates you are a safe driver (speed, accel, decel). Many units out there melt in areas with a lot of sun and heat (Vegas, baby - yeah!)

Dashcams have a whirlwind of features, gimmicks, forms, qualities, and drivers' needs associated with them... I'd pare it down to what I need:

Best resolution I can find: The wide-angle lens makes distant items hard to see (like license plates), so more resolution helps.

Stealth: A sparkly frame on the lens can be easily viewed through the window... at night. Target for thieves. They can replay the recording of themselves stealing it - at their home.

Temperature tolerant: I live in the desert with 300 days of sunshine and heat high enough to burst the cheap butane lighters. I have lost many to this phenomenon... I wouldn't want to lose a dashcam.

Wide Dynamic Range. Tech-speak for "can see better at night". Yes... you will be driving in lit conditions - but the bright lights blind the camera from the areas not well-lit. A nice camera can see in the "shadows" better than the bottom-priced units.

Recording capacity and loop control. I want to be able to break the recordings down to 1-minute increments, with zero gap between files. Many units have a recording gap because it can't store video and write to the card at the same time. At these resolutions, a 1-minute video can approach 300 megabytes in size - a bugger to transfer the action shot to another device while your adrenaline is still amped from an accident. (Oh... if you are involved in an accident, don't share the vids without your attorney). 32G is a good minimum size. You need time available on the card to reduce the risk of overwriting an "event".

Recording media - SD or Micro SD is the trend right now. Do not get the kind with internal recording, the transfer is a pain in the butt, way too slow, or both... plus it's likely outdated by the time it reaches your vehicle.

For those seeking information overload: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]

I installed this unit in BigRed! I have it right next to the rear view mirror so it does not block my vision at all. I also hard wired the power to ign on and off . I ran the wires up into the front edge of the headliner so as not to hang down.:-X22 One of the things I figured out he hard way was you need a high speed sd card for most dash cams to work properly. The picture quality is great ! nice and clear and nite view is also very good considering the low lite!:-X22

Smokie

I like that camera. I think i might get a couple. One question, can you turn the audio off at all?

So with all that info, what product do you recommend?

Thats good to know Smokie, thanks.

how did you install?

got the rvm mount for the cam, and already have a homebrew cigarette adapter behind the stereo. plan to run wires behind headliner/pillar/panel and plug it in there. want this to be a permanent mount. on/off with key.


be careful buying these. fleabay is flooded with knock offs. would say chinese, but they are made there already, lol

spytec and gearbest are good vendors

I installed a BlackVue DR550 2 weeks ago. It did have some overheating issues till I upgraded the firmware which seems to have fixed it. I use a 64gb high speed card, 64gb is not natively supported and requires a few extra steps to format it with fat32 before it will work. The front and rear cameras are small with the front hiding almost entirely behind the mirror. There is no screen which helps keep the size down so you do all the setup over wifi with your phone.

I just use the suction cup and plug in power port as I take it in other trucks

I am looking into the Mobius. The small size, good mount, and sharp recording are plusses.

The downside is that it has no built-in monitor, so it takes some additional steps to get it focused and aimed properly.

Anyone with any hands-on experience with this one? Since it is available in a standard and a wide-angle lens, which would you get?

Pop

thanks.

don't want to go that route. just want to get it installed and forget about it. shouldn't be too bad of an install. will update you guys when everything comes in.

I would like a small unit that hides behind my mirror. Cmon irs 2014. How hard is that. I don't require a screen. I'll have to do some shopping. Don't need anything fancy like GPS either.

An idea to take things step further:

With the cheap cost of hard drives and small compact basic mini pc format it might be worth putting a small PC box that you could remote into with any of the andriod apple or windows phones or of course with a keyboard and small flat screen which could be a GPS if its has a aux video in feed. That would then allow you to have a ton of HD space to keep all your video on and could over write it given that much space and be in no danger of over writing something recent. Single Hd at 4 TB would cover you for a long time. Not to mention it could then be used for all sorts of things like running Auto Enginuity your GPS with a monitor which could be touch screen as well. Nice to be able to bring up certain engine data with date stamp to track issues and their start etc. That is only scratching the surface.

Then again I have a bad habit of going down these rabbit holes and taking things a bit farther than maybe some may wish to go. It just with the tech today you can really do some very nice and helpful things for a few hundred dollars.


I know after driving in large OTRs and lifted PUs etc having a front camera wide angle is almost mandatory if you do even moderate city/in-town driving where you have people in cross walks. You literally can not see a person step off the curb and right by your passenger side front end with people walking right up next to the bumper. Light turns green and ............... something you will haunt you forever.

Anyways just a thought.

I have liked the idea of a mini PC for carious controls. For the average Joe a dash cam should suffice. 4GB cards are not at all hard to come by. Heck, throw a 64gb in and you're good for a long while. But I have a 4 camera system (should have patented it years ago when I installed it... Anyone seen the new F150?) And it would be beneficial to record all 4 feeds simultaneously.

Already went nuts on the house.

Don't think the truck warrants the same, but you never know... Lol

Lol my cameras are for off road. They clean up my blind spots. While already small, off road blind spots kill especially in big vehicles. I have one on each mirror pointed at the front tires to avoid cliffs, a nose camera for steep inclines where I can't see the ground in front of me, only sky, and a back up camera :)

i feel like i shouldn't post here… onboard videos cams aren't for me. i'm just not there yet...

I have mine any time I go into a bank at night to use atm machine or any time I am in a store. I tend to point it near the door as that is where strange things happen. I use the dash cam as security system when not driving

There are many police and some fire and ems agencies issuing personal wearable cameras to their personal for the same reason.

I can't point at a single unit and say "That one" without owning one myself. I can read piles of specs and tell you which one is the flavor of the month, but I could miss something. I can share the list of things that are "gotchas" to watch out for, and features to consider for wants and needs. Objective reviews (pros and cons shared) from people who have used the product are your best friend in the Wild West that is the dashcam market. Those links I shared have plenty of examples of that very thing.

The Mobius was once the most recommended dashcam on the market. Since that time, many good products have come onto the market. The Mobius is not unlike the HERO action cameras, it's just a less expensive (and lower quality) version. If you go with the narrow-field lens, you can miss important things... like a vehicle entering an intersection in front of the truck. The drawback to the wide-angled lens is that it's just like the bottom lens on your tow mirror - distant objects are not easily seen. Hi-resolution cameras combat this problem - a little.

The problem with combination cameras (color and IR) is that the internal DVR records one or the other at a time - not both simultaneously. The cameras frequently switch between color and IR as the ambient light changes. The real problem kicks in when the camera is facing a set of headlights - this can make the camera switch back and forth between color and IR, and the electronics are playing a game of "catch-up" to get the image to remain clear with detail. This is akin to taking the time for your eyes to adjust when you walk from the house into the bright sunshine, then back again.

I work with "Car PCs" on a daily basis, they have SSDs - Solid State (hard) Drives. SSDs are slowly replacing the "legacy" spinning-disk hard drives in computers. We have a number of rack-mount i7 computers at work that have SSDs, with no HDDs that you likely have in the computer giving you access to the forum right now. The benefits are crazy-fast boot-ups and read times, very low power demand, no need for "defragging", and no moving parts - allegedly making them more reliable (we'll see). This no moving parts thing is where SSDs shine for an 8000-pound brick... like getting rid of the skipping that can happen on a CD player. SSDs were once crazy-expensive, but the prices are plummeting - as happens when new computer technology is mass-produced and mass-consumed.

Don't expect car PCs to be as reliable as their desktop counterparts - they live in very different environments. Vibration, dust, and extreme temps are very unfriendly to electronic circuitry. While you might make the counterpoint that the dash stereo has been working great for a lot of years, I could counter "What about the overhead?". The old car stereos are very basic and robust - car PCs are advanced technology by comparison... and a car stereo never needed a fan on the "processor" to keep it from overheating when in use. The car PCs I work with don't have fans - they are one great big heat-sink... and they need to be mounted where it's coolest in the vehicle and gets the most ventilation. The cooling fins need to be cleaned on a regular basis... so access is a factor.

The PCM's seem to live life ok in these trucks. Not sure if they have as hard life as a car stereo or overhead computer...

Yes, they do. They are also proprietary (and relatively simple) modules purpose-made. Many components in the car PC were engineered and built for a purpose other than riding in a NASA shock bed in an oven. While many people tout technology as making wondrous advancements in the last two decades, technology also threw robustness under the "Get money fast" bus. I am constantly repairing computers that are blowing components that never failed on the older versions of PCs. We're ripping through RAM, cooling fan mounts, graphics cards, LAN cards, FireWire splitters, hard drives, and power supplies on six-year-old computers, replacing 8-year-old computers - while the old Windows 98 computers are still chugging along with the original hardware.

What's going on? The "more-with-less" mentality has ruled for the last decade - 90nm integrated circuits went into production about that time - then 65nm ICs, and now they're talking 35nm ICs. As these chips pack more power on less real estate, we also get introduced to nasty phenomena like heat and "whiskers"... where conductive structures actually grow between the conductors for the processors. The electronics before this era were like dinosaurs (compared to modern capabilities) to be sure, but they also just kept working.

If the software/firmware was a failure, the lines of code were far fewer and simpler to manage. Now... the complexity is so vast that it takes a fleet of software engineers two years to find out why something is unstable (Windows Vista).

car pc is a thing of the past. cell phones and tablets can do almost everything.

While I have not worked in a dedicated automotive field I have done numerous gov/dod contracts for dev and IT support. I fully agree with the SSD. I was trying to split hte middle in recommendations for those that do not or can not afford to put $$ toward the SSD. All of my personal laptops minus things like my NAS etc are all SSD only. As you well know once you use a SSD you will never want to go back to "analog" hard drives. The speed and reliability is so far ahead in the SSD. I recall when they were still in dev and not public release watching a demo cold boot time demonstration.

My point was for those looking to use muli camera systems at least to me it makes sense to have a centralized server (mini) handling the storage . Given that a person might as well plan for future upgrades such as touch screen in the dash or center console. Attach GPS . Route diagnostic logging to it as well. A couple 512 SSD driver will take care of most anything needed for storage. IF anything needed to be saved could be handled via wifi once parked at a home for offloading. You could even script it to offload all diagnostic logging and video on a schedule to a home NAS or other large HD capacity machine.

I very much doubt I have anywhere near the direct experience specific to camera in automotive that you have so you likely know far more of the positives and well as pitfalls. But I do think where 10 yrs ago something like this would be very cost prohibitive today you could build something very impressive for the price of say a top end laptop. Something quiet beneficial and usable for far far less.

I would love to hear anything you have on ideas or "in's and out's" of the "automotive PC" world. I am planning on working up a full system on my current Excursion project.

What have you found are the best encolsures powersupples and motherboards for these applications?

Ive had 3 makes of in car video recorders over the years, the first 2 makes were just junk with no reliable way of getting the recorded video off the devise.

My latest in car and truck, yep 2 of them is the Smarty BX 1000, the are reliable with good quality dowloadable video, the video is a sinch to get off the devise unlike some.

Made in Sth Korea so its all good stuff.

That would be somewhat of a hijack... even though it partially applies here.

empiretc - Car PCs here, or a dedicated thread?

There are dash cam apps for Android phones that are pretty good. I have a windshield mount for my Thunderbolt. I used a dash cam app for my trip to OC, just in case anything crazy happened as I passed by Baltimore - crazy driver hotspot. Don't remember the app I used but I remember it was free and it worked fairly well.

there are several different apps- a lot of free ones, and most people have an extra phone laying around. that is one option.

like stated earlier, though, want a permanent setup. after reading several forums and reviews, the g1w seems like a winner. especially for the price.

Ive used a British company, SmartWitness, in my company cars for the past 6 years. They have awesome camera's and great customer service. Camera's sit in hot cars in the south all day and have never had a problem overheating. Their new camera's will even email any "incident" that happens using cell phone technology. All 8 cars I have are using an older version of SVC404E with a monitor added and all the telematics. Attached is a link for their produce catalog. If you want the US distributors name and #, send me a PM

Good Afternoon All!

Its been about 6 months since the latest posting, so I am wondering if there is anything new on the market, or if any of you have any additional experience with dash cams.

In addition to the 'basics', I want something that has low light capability, motion detect and GPS. Preferably something I can also hard wire into the truck.

I don't care so much if it has a monitor just so long as I can USB connect it to my laptop or GS4 to view the data.

Thanks.

Regards,
Steve.

I have my eye on this one, read the reviews on the net about it, it seems alright.

Motion sense would be park mode. The Powerucc PANORAMA ⅡS has everything you're looking for and is highly rated by reviewers, but it takes a couple of Buck$Zooka rounds (just under $200) to put it in your cab.

I have an update for the BlackVue DR550. It didn't like the Texas heat. The rear camera keep dieing so it went back to Amazon. Slightly less annoying, it also had an issue with parking mode. I could never find a good balance for motion detection where it would start recording if someone walked by but not record if the wind made the leafs on a tree move.

I'll probably try another camera later this year but not till it starts getting hot.