News This Raspberry Pi dashcam continuously records even when your car is off

[Admin]

Fishwithadeagle has created a custom Raspberry Pi-powered dashcam system that keeps recording even when your vehicle isn't running.

This Raspberry Pi dashcam continuously records even when your car is off : Read more

 

[kyzarvs]

I looked at this a couple of years ago. Despite the article, mainstream stuff on Amazon is a lot cheaper - certainly under £150 if you just want offline recording and front/rear internal cameras.

The other issue is that decent external cameras (my project was to record trackdays, so a camera low down in the front bumper and a rear-facing one on the rear wing added drama lol) are all composite and not digital, which added encoding workload to the pi. Getting 2x composite feeds + 1/2 digital feeds for inside the car + GPS trace started getting insanely difficult and expensive. I ended up with a motorbike (weatherproof) kit that did it all with wifi, remote control etc for about £250

 

[KyaraM]

Sounds like a privacy laws violation to me.

 

[edzieba]

The big killer with these systems is that numberplate legibility is a foundational requirement, and very hard to achieve in practice for the range of normal lighting conditions encountered. e.g. the same camera needs to be able to have a plate legible in direct head-on sunlight, direct behind-camera sunlight (important for plates that are retroreflective) in the dead of night (both streetlight-dominated and headlight-dominated) and at various angles relative to the camera.

This is where cheap dashcams really start to fall over. One option with the Raspi version would be to add a dedicated nIR camera with its own illumination solely for ANPR logging, so the visible-light camera can balance and expose for scene legibility - as it can do easily and by default - with numberplates still captured.

 

[kyzarvs]

The big killer with these systems is that numberplate legibility is a foundational requirement, and very hard to achieve in practice for the range of normal lighting conditions encountered. e.g. the same camera needs to be able to have a plate legible in direct head-on sunlight, direct behind-camera sunlight (important for plates that are retroreflective) in the dead of night (both streetlight-dominated and headlight-dominated) and at various angles relative to the camera.

This is where cheap dashcams really start to fall over. One option with the Raspi version would be to add a dedicated nIR camera with its own illumination solely for ANPR logging, so the visible-light camera can balance and expose for scene legibility - as it can do easily and by default - with numberplates still captured.

For in-car cameras, I completely agree with you - I've had several and there's always an issue with legibility.

For my current setup though with weatherproof composite cameras from a motorbike kit, a useful side effect of the cameras actually being at the front / rear of the vehicle (as opposed to in the passenger compartment in the middle) is that number plates are much more recognisable. Also choosing the right FoV width really helps - fitting say 90 degrees into a 2560 wide image is much easier than 140