Dashcams - Make your own with old stuff

[Greaver]

Hey people as some of you may remember I have been looking into dashcams for some time, which was bought on by one of my mates having to pay her excess to get her car fixed after getting hit because of a lying prick, the insurance company being s*** and the cops being too busy to come out.

It struck me when I first looked into it that my excess is nearly $1000 (even though my yearly payments are reasonable at $860) and that potentially having to pay this because some retard can\'t own up for their s*** driving would suck.

Anyway I looked into all the commercial options available, both from \'reputable\' manufacturers and cheap Chinese ones and discovered there are some very reasonably priced Chinese ones that do almost everything the expensive ones do with similar quality - but I can get tighter than that.

I realized that if I used a cellphone I would get GPS, WIFI, decent storage space and a big screen for very little if there was software that could help.

Enter the $40 Samsung Galaxy S1 with a porked battery I picked up a year or so ago, which I promptly replaced for very little, and a couple of free android applications to test. 720p h264 here I come

DailyRoads Voyager - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dailyroads.v&hl=en

AutoGuard Blackbox - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hovans.autoguard&hl=en1

Both of these apps are compatible with Android 2.1 right the way through to Android 4.1 (maybe earlier too, but it covers all my android devices)

Dailyroads has a much better interface for how you are likely to use it imo and a vast range of options but the number of clips it will record before rewriting over the oldest is oddly short, I am seeing what can be done about this at the moment.

Autoguard seems to work well too though and I will make a write up of these apps and the other ones on the market (most of which are rated lower hence me starting with these two) when I have done more testing.

Both of these apps support GPS too so you can include both time, speed and GPS coordinates with your videos.

For now I need to sort out power and a mount that doesn\'t have such a wide base (obscuring a little vision) but when its done I will post pics etc - so far its worked much better than expected.

The beauty of this setup is that makes my other plan for a dashcam setup simple - I want it so when I park my car at home the device would connect to my wifi and any new videos recorded while I was out would be transferred to my server inside, with android this is going to be a 2 minute job to setup.

A little pedantic I know but this way I never have to think about removing the device to get stuff off it (and thus can make the installation a little more permanent too) and so I can keep a decent history, would be nice to think if a major crime was committed and I had happened to be in the area, that I could provide a video with number plates of vehicles and/or people in the area at the time if I am already going to this effort.

Not to mention the muppets I am going to catch on camera being terrible drivers, could be some awesome youtube compilations out of this.

But yeah as above I will post some pics and a full write up when I have things as I want it, if this goes well I will be on the lookout for a second cheap phone to set up in the back window too.

[subi4snow]

Sounds like an awesome idea mate. Look forward to seeing results/progress.

Will the phones be partially hidden somehow or just in a mount on the dash/parcel tray? Might be tempting thieves to break in if there are two phones sitting in plain sight?

[Greaver]

Plan is to stealth them somehow when I have them setup how I want

Back window will be a lot easier than the front

Good thing about phones is all the aftermarket cases that still have slots for the camera, USB etc - should be able to mod one of those so people don\'t notice it/or wont know what it is

Biggest issue will be power, I am looking into USB power in cars atm

[lachlan]

is it worth sticking the front one up on the front of the rear veiw mirror ? might have a better view and noone will spot it anyway .

car usb power, hard wire 2 of these ?

http://www.trademe.co.nz/mobile-phones/accessories/chargers/car-chargers/auction-576671903.htm

[ODB]

Hard bro so gets power whenever car is running.

What size hard drive to the SG1s have? Problem I can see is you running out of storage for 720p pretty quickly

[Greaver]

Problem with those is I still need a cigarette slot available for other stuff in the car, these need to be separate if possible, especially as it will need good current.

Might go visit an auto sparky and see how hard it would be to take a powered USB hub (5V) and wire it in with a fuse off the battery or something

[ADIKT]

Subscribed

[DRFVDR]

Sweet I may do this myself as well I have 2 old android devices here that need a good home

Re 5v usb, just buy a 12v-5v USB lighter plug,rip the plastic bits of it, run wires to a acc point, USB out the other end and chuck the whole lot in a piece of shrink tube and then cable tie under the dash

[boon]

What he said. I have a 2-port 1A Usb charger buried in behind my dash somewhere with extension cables run out for charging. Works well.