rear camera disconnecting

Well technically my vendor replaced only the rear camera I assume the vendor will exchange it with blackvue but who knows. My vendor did not send a new front camera but that's fine I will see if the rear camera replacement works and if the problem continues I will request the front camera to be replaced also.

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I wish my vendor was this co-operative :( let us know how you get on please.
 
Will do. Still working but too soon to know if it's solved.

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Well, it made it 12 days without incident. Today the replacement rear camera disconnected. I will contact the vendor tomorrow and ask for a replacement front camera. I promised I would post an update and here it is. Damn. I thought I was in the clear.

No cold weather by the way.

Edit:. I guess it was pretty cold when I got in the car for the first time after two days. But it was not excessively cold.

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Update:front camera replaced. We shall see if the problem is solved because the replacement of the rear camera did not solve the problem.

I did not start this thread a problem was started by somebody else with my identical problem. If anybody browsing This Thread is having an issue with their rear camera disconnecting after a couple of days please stand up and say hello.

I am hoping nobody else has the problem and cross my fingers the replacement front camera will close the ticket.

This concludes my latest update. No news is good news and I will provide a status update in 30 days if the disconnect does not reappear.

This is Adam I am signing off on Monday March 5 09 16 Eastern Standard Time. Good day.

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Front camera replaced. Same disconnect problem. So that leaves a bad front-rear cable, bad software, or design issue.

If it was design issue or software one would suspect more widespread reported issues. I guess I need to replace the cable. This is a major job that will cost hundreds for my installer to do this replacement as it's a highly technical install in a Tesla Model X. But I am out of ideas. I just don't see how it can be a cable if removing and restoring power fixes it.

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Depending on how the cable was installed the first time, the #2 time around might be faster, i was thinking maybe use cable #1 to pull cable #2 thru.
But of course if its fixed in place with cable ties or squashed in tight then that might not be possible.

New cars are now so damn smart that working on them,,,, well often not so smart.
And its nothing new, i have worked on house sized diesel engines in ships, and to do some little simple things on such a engine require you pull or loosen 25 other things.
So often you will have heard me curse engineers to hell, both the ones that designed the ship / engine, and the ships engineers that was supposed to do the work but left it to me instead so they can sit in a nice cool air conditioned control room.
 
One option I am contemplating is running a new cable temporarily from the front camera to the rear camera and leave it in place for 30 days or sooner if it disconnects. Not the prettiest solution but it would be temporary. If the rear camera stays connected for 30 days straight it would obviously be the cable. This way I can avoid spending hundreds of dollars only to find the problem is not fixed if it's not the cable.

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Yeah wit hthe problems you have experienced so far i think its a good idea to do a trial run of sorts first before you commit more money at the shop.
 
Here is another idea. And this is what I intend to do. Perhaps I cut and replace one cable end at a time and install a new connector. I have found these connectors which appear to be the correct specs (50 ohm):

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/molex-llc/0733660010/WM5539-ND/1465161 (right angle)
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/molex-llc/0733660020/WM5388-ND/2755904 (straight)

I mean, for under $10 including shipping I can try new ends. This is not rocket science. I doubt the cable is crimped somewhere. If its faulty, it is probably end related. Maybe the pin is not long enough on an existing end and there is a momentary intermittant gap.

I am going to try this and purchase some RG174 cable as well (the spec for the Blackvue Cable can be found here: https://www.blackvue.com/product/coaxial-cable/

I will order a few ends for testing purposes and make my own test cable and if it works, I will cut and install new ends on the main cable. Worst case scenerio is that I &^%$ up the main cable and then I will get it replaced anyway as part of the final thing I can do to get this working.

Edit: This is all ordered. I will get to the bottom of this if it is the last. thing. I. ever. do.

Edit 2: I am now hyper-focused on the theory that the center pin on one or the other (or both) ends of the coaxial cable is too short. The basis of this theory is a post I came across somewhere that said the rear camera cannot be "hot swapped" and power must be removed and reapplied to connect the rear camera again. If this is true, it would follow that a momentary "open" connection, no matter how brief, would cause a rear camera disconnect which would not recover even if the connection was restored. This explains why removing power and re-applying power always fixes the issue. Ruling out both cameras now as a cause, and making an assumption this is not a design or software issue, and making a further assumption that the wire itself is not faulty (coax is pretty tough), and making a final assumption that the ground sleeve on the MCX plug clearly has a snug fit, all signs point toward a center pin that, while visibly straight, is too short literally by under a millimeter. Think of your two opposite fingertips barely touching. Break the bond momentarily and the camera dies until power is removed and restored. This is easy enough to fix by replacing the ends of the cable without needing to go back to the shop (I am skilled enough to do this myself). I will make a test cable before I cut the operational cable. I ordered this - https://www.amazon.com/gp/B016EBRQAA - which matches the cable description on the Blackvue spec page. If the test cable works, I will leave that in place draped to the rear of the car for a few days and see what happens. If it still drops, i will give up. But at least I have a plan. I think I may be right as to the problem. As for OCD that the cable end at the main camera may be silver or look odd, I can get this cover and hide it: https://www.blackvue.com/tamper-proof-case/

I will update as I go. It may take until mid next week to get the connectors in the mail.
 
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Same problem here! Rear camera disconnects. Seems to happen in the middle of the night before reboot happens. I have to say that it does seem to happen when the temps are low.

This is my second set of cameras, I had to replace the other two cameras because there were a lot of issues with WiFi, Rear Camera Disconnect, Cloud......

I did not replace the rear camera cable when I installed the new Cameras. My thinking was as others, why would it be the cable when it happens when the vehicle is unoccupied and stationary. I guess there could be a small gap with the end Connection pin but when I wiggle or tap the connection the camera does not disconnect.

I was thinking it was possibly a low voltage situation. It does seem to only happen when my vehicle is in park mode and has been sitting for many hours. Might be that the rear camera doesn’t like the lower voltage where the front camera can handle it. Who knows!

Looking forward to hearing what you find out Adam!!!

Another problem I have is when I drive away from my home hotspot, the camera disconnects from the hotspot for the cloud service. When I return to my house and the hotspot, the camera does not reconnect, I have to turn the WiFi off on the camera and then back on and then it connects to the cloud. I figure this has nothing to do with the rear camera issue but just thought I would mention it.

Thanks!
 
I was thinking it was possibly a low voltage situation. It does seem to only happen when my vehicle is in park mode and has been sitting for many hours. Might be that the rear camera doesn’t like the lower voltage where the front camera can handle it. Who knows!

Mine also seems to only happen when my vehicle is in park mode and has been sitting for many hours - but I do not think it is a low voltage issue. Either way, I am going to rule out the cable one way or another.
 
Mine also seems to only happen when my vehicle is in park mode and has been sitting for many hours - but I do not think it is a low voltage issue. Either way, I am going to rule out the cable one way or another.
Sounds Great Adam!!!
 
Well my rear camera disconnected again last night. Last recording was 23:59. The night before it was 00:12 so right around the same time!
 
Mine disconnected again too at around 10 PM while in parking mode in my garage. The reason I do not think mine is power related is because I own a Tesla and the main traction battery automatically charges the 12VDC battery that runs the accessories such as the dash cam. I have unlimited power provided I charge the car during normal operation. It is cold again in my area. In theory this might support my center pin theory because metals contract in cold weather and maybe the center pin pulled away per the posts above.
 
Oh good point on the cold and the pin contracting! I’m in Illinois and it has been colder the last two nights. I will pull the temps and see what they were when it disconnected.
 
The temps were within a degree of each other when the camera disconnected. Will be interesting to see if happens around the same temps constantly or if it stays connected when it stays above those temps.

Also you are right about the voltage not being the issue because when I unplugged the power to the camera and plugged it back in to reboot and reconnect the rear camera, the rear camera connnected and the battery voltage was exactly at 12v, I didn’t start the vehicle so it didn’t get any charge. Usually my battery is around 12.7 volts when I shut the vehicle off and goes down over time from that point.

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Hold everything I may have a major discovery.

Something caught my eye and I had an idea. I went back through all the recordings on my SD card and may have found a pattern to the disconnects. I formatted my SD card on March 6 but since that time I have all the recordings. When the rear camera disconnects it also stops logging recordings for the rear, however the front still records.

If you look at the attached photo, the 'start' date and time is when I removed power and powered back up to get the rear camera connected again. The "last rec" is the last rear recording registered before it stopped recording and became disconnected. The "next fow" is the next forward recording when there should have been a rear recording.

Look at the circled times. The last rear recording is always between 21:30 and 22:30. I seem to remember that being the case before I formatted the SD card but I am not sure. I am not saying that formatting the SD card caused the issue but instead I do not have the actual data to check the last time the rear camera was connected prior to March 6 (but I know it was happening consistently)

The only thing I can think of is the setting to restart the dashcam which I have enabled for 3 a.m. However here is another coincidence. I noticed that when I set the firmware setting to show the time on the video, if I left it set to set the time by GPS automatically the time was off by 4 or 5 hours. I guess it was not converting Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to my time zone. I therefore set the time manually. I raise this issue because maybe the unit is automatically restarting at 3 a.m GMT. My local time is 5 hours earlier than GMT and this would place me at a restart at 10 p.m. local time. This is right smack in the middle of the 9:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. time frame that the rear camera seems to be consistently disconnecting.

This will be easy enough to test immediately. I will be turning off the automatic restart right after I post this message. If the camera stops disconnecting and stays connected consistently we may have found a software issue!

Come on guys this cannot be a coincidence I think I am on to something. We shall see within the next 72 hours starting with tomorrow morning if the camera remains connected.
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No rear cam disconnect overnight! I'll follow up in a few days but this is encouraging that I may have found the issue.

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This looks as though it coincides with my disconnect times. I have not done the math but I’m at -6 GMT and my camera is set to reboot at 3am I do know that the times are always close when it happens
 
Just thinking about this; I always get a message at 3 am that the camera has disconnected and then reconnected right after that via the cloud. So this wouldn’t be the issue.
 
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