Mobile Hotspot

Jeez, I never thought about the iPad orientation. I happened to have been using mine with a keyboard, in landscape mode. I suppose I’d have never found what works, except by chance. And yup, whomever designed this should get the full Lego treatment, this kind of thing sucks, a simple password change should be obvious.

I had the bright idea of using wife’s Mac, wired, to see if I could get the admin function to be more stable. It was better, but eventually began intermittent disconnecting. I’m not going to worry about this problem, because once the passwords are as I want them I don’t see going into admin mode much. Hard to believe that it’s an Apple problem, propagated across two different operating systems, but I suppose that anything is possible.

I’ve ordered a 12VDC to 5VDC converter, with USB plug. I’m going to have a hotwired hotspot and if this leads to having to replace the hotspot battery more often, so be it.

Now I‘m trying to figure out the next thing that I want to do. I want this camera primarily for the standard reason of evidence-if/when-needed. But I have another thing. We do a lot of over the road trips through great scenery, and this camera should allow us to share some of it with our kids. I‘ve put a test video clip into my cloud account. Playing it back at full resolution caused a lot of buffering on my home internet (can’t understand this but I’ll deal with it later). One way that I can think of, for viewing by my kids, is to give them access to my cloud, which I assume there is some way to do. Another is to create a Youtube account, which I’ve never done but people say it’s not hard to do, and put it there. We have Dropbox but I want something where my kids don’t have to mess with yet another sort of app. So, my question is, do you do this sort of thing - sharing your videos? If so, how do you do it?
There are many reasons I passed on going the hotspot route and just went with the CM100 as battery life along with auto power off even if hardwired were just a few..

If you are going to get a 12v to 5v converter to hardwire it make sure you get some sort of inline battery voltage cutoff. Once you hardwire it, it will just keep drawing from the vehicle battery until the vehicle battery is dead if you don't have some sort of voltage cutoff used inline...

After all my research into using a hotspot and reading about your issues, I am completely happy that I avoided going that route.

Good luck!
 
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I have decided just to use my phone until I can justify a hotspot.
I would have probably already invested in the Blackvue Hotspot but not with T-Mobile.
 
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I’ll do it with youtube.

We just got back from a weekend trip. I have some problems. I get audio messages from the Blackvue that are too thin/weak to understand, and I have the volume turned up all the way. The hotspot disconnected from the Blackvue. One of the audio messages probably told me same, but since the audio is beyond my ability to hear I wouldn’t know.

It was my perception that once the Blackview is connected it stays connected. Or if there is a glitch it automatically re-connects. Either my understanding is wrong or there is a problem with one of the devices.

Questions:

1. Is there a way to have the speaker more understandable. Alternately, is there a way that I can get a notification on my apple devices when a disconnection from my hotspot occurs? I get notification of impact events and all, but nothing that tells me what the voice in the cylinder on the windshield just said.

2. Is there a way to get the Blackvue to automatically try to re-connect if a disruption occurs? I thought that this was the way it was designed to work. Mine isn’t working this way.
 
There are many reasons I passed on going the hotspot route and just went with the CM100 as battery life along with auto power off even if hardwired were just a few..

If you are going to get a 12v to 5v converter to hardwire it make sure you get some sort of inline battery voltage cutoff. Once you hardwire it, it will just keep drawing from the vehicle battery until the vehicle battery is dead if you don't have some sort of voltage cutoff used inline...

After all my research into using a hotspot and reading about your issues, I am completely happy that I avoided going that route.

Good luck!
Raqball, sorry I never saw your comment until now (who knew that there was a page 2 until I looked for my most recent post?)

I got the 12V-to5V converer, but at the moment I’m not sure that I’ll hardwire it. The first night that I left my hotspot plugged into the car the hotspot battery went down to about 10%; it was plugged into a USB port in the car, but a port that doesn’t have voltage unless the car is running. This sort of hotspot battery drain won’t work for some of our needs. So I thought that I am going to have to hardwire it (not concerned about car battery drain, as the hotspot supposedly has an internal circuit that makes it operate like a battery charger as opposed to a trickle charger, but I would have to verify this).

But then I checked in morning a couple of subsequent mornings. Even though I had left the hotspot powered-up, I was over 90% remaining charge, far different that the first reading that I had taken. And the hotspot showed that there were no devices connected to it. I would have thought that the hotspot would have shown that the Blackvue is connected - it didn’t. And while I’m driving I sometimes get voice messages that are too faint to understand, but I think they are telling me that the hotspot isn’t connected, which seems crazy.

So, I did a test this morning. I had my wife stand in front of the car, so that she could be seen by the dash cam. She held the hotspot in her hand. It showed zero connected devices. I called her with our cellphones, for voice coordination. Then I walked a block down the street and checked to make certain that there was no wi-fi connection. I told her that I was going to bring up live view in parking mode. I did. It worked perfectly, I could see her standing in front of the car. At no time did she note that there was a device connected to the hotspot.

So, how in the world is this thing doing what it does? What I was expecting was that either a) there would be no live coverage or b) if there was, that somehow the Blackvue would sense an incoming request (I have no idea how it could possibly do this) and connect to the hotspot (not observed by wife). My first thought was that the hotspot doesn’t reliably show a new connection. So, when I got back I did a wi-fi connection to my iphone and immediately the hotspot screen alerted us to a new connection having been granted.

Can you shed light on the mystery of what is going on? How in the world am I connecting w/o a connnection?
 
So, how in the world is this thing doing what it does? What I was expecting was that either a) there would be no live coverage or b) if there was, that somehow the Blackvue would sense an incoming request (I have no idea how it could possibly do this) and connect to the hotspot (not observed by wife). My first thought was that the hotspot doesn’t reliably show a new connection. So, when I got back I did a wi-fi connection to my iphone and immediately the hotspot screen alerted us to a new connection having been granted.

Can you shed light on the mystery of what is going on? How in the world am I connecting w/o a connnection?
I honestly have no idea... Could be some weird setting on the hotspot device where it times out devices after xxx amount of time? Is it only the camera that act this way? For instance if you connect a phone or a tablet to it and just let it sit connected does it behave the same?

Mine always connects and stays connected to the CM100 per the timeouts I have set in the BlackVue app settings. In may case I have it set to power off after 6 hours or 12V, whichever happens 1st..

FWIW, if you decide to switch over to the CM100 these is an update for the Camera firmware than now allows 5 devices to be connected to it at the same time instead of the previous which was only 1 additional device..
 
So, how in the world is this thing doing what it does? What I was expecting was that either a) there would be no live coverage or b) if there was, that somehow the Blackvue would sense an incoming request (I have no idea how it could possibly do this) and connect to the hotspot (not observed by wife). My first thought was that the hotspot doesn’t reliably show a new connection. So, when I got back I did a wi-fi connection to my iphone and immediately the hotspot screen alerted us to a new connection having been granted.

Can you shed light on the mystery of what is going on? How in the world am I connecting w/o a connnection?

You were definitely connected to some wifi network. Sounds like you were connected to your home wifi.

Do you have your home wifi in the #1 slot in the Cloud service hotspot settings menu?

If you do, once your cam is connected to it, you can turn your hotspot on and off all you want, the cam will never connect to it, because it ranks below the current connection in the heirarchy, unless it loses connection with the network in the #1 slot (the home network). That's likely why your battery was still > 90%--nothing was connected to it all night.

I keep my car hotspot in the #1 slot and home wifi in the #2 slot. That way when I pull into my garage and turn off the hotspot, it will automatically search for the next lower network in the list (my home wifi). When I leave in the morning and it loses the home wifi connection, it will automatically try the other two connections in order of their position in the list, so it finds the car hotspot automatically.
 
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And the kewpie doll goes to Kannina 2.0! How did I miss the obvious? Tunnel vision - I was focused on the hotspot because I suspected a problem with it. Yes, the car was in the garage this morning when my wife and I did the test. And yes I have the home wifi in the #1 slot. Thanks!

So I have a new mystery: A couple of days after I installed the hotspot I noticed that data usage was 1+ GB. Today I noticed that it has gone go 3+ GB. We are talking a week. I can’t account for the data usage because I never used the hotspot for anything other than to see if the system was working correctly for live viewing. A few seconds, no more than twice, which can hardly account for 2 GB of usage. Any ideas?

And a couple of questions...

If I have my home internet in the #1 slot, when I pull into the driveway will the system automatically disconnect from the hotspot and connect to my home network?

Is there anyplace in the app that tells me what the current connection is? This app is generally confusing when it comes to connectivity.
 
And the kewpie doll goes to Kannina 2.0! How did I miss the obvious? Tunnel vision - I was focused on the hotspot because I suspected a problem with it. Yes, the car was in the garage this morning when my wife and I did the test. And yes I have the home wifi in the #1 slot. Thanks!

That's the power of "Been There, Done That." Pretty sure I beat my head against the proverbial wall over the same problem for a few days when the cam was new to me.

So I have a new mystery: A couple of days after I installed the hotspot I noticed that data usage was 1+ GB. Today I noticed that it has gone go 3+ GB. We are talking a week. I can’t account for the data usage because I never used the hotspot for anything other than to see if the system was working correctly for live viewing. A few seconds, no more than twice, which can hardly account for 2 GB of usage. Any ideas?

My guess is that you had your phone connected to the hotspot and it stayed there because the signal was strong enough so that it never dropped its connection. If the hotspot's wifi signal is strong enough to hold the phone connected, it would never drop the signal and then go looking for your home network to automatically switch over. As long as your phone was active, the hotspot stayed awake and all your phone's traffic went over the hotspot instead of your home network until you forced a disconnect yourself. That's all your extra traffic. The same thing will happen with your cam if you connect your phone to it and forget to change your phone's wifi back to your home network after you're done messing with the firmware config.

Remember the power of BTDT?!

For this very reason, I force my phone to forget the password to the cam and the car hotspot every time I finish with whatever fiddling I connected to either of them for. That way it can't connect to them without me realizing it.

Could also be that you have motion detection on in parking mode, auto upload to cloud enabled for parking events, the cam connected to the hotspot, and something constantly moving in front of the cam that you're not aware of...

If I have my home internet in the #1 slot, when I pull into the driveway will the system automatically disconnect from the hotspot and connect to my home network?

Generally, no (see caveat below). It'll only go looking for another wifi network if it loses its connection to whatever its currently on. You want your vehicle's hotspot in the "Hotspot 1" slot, and your home wifi in the "Hotspot 2" slot.

Then when you pull into your garage, you manually turn off the vehicle hotspot when you turn the car off. The cam loses its wifi connection and goes looking for a new one in that list of three in the order that you entered them. It'll autoconnect to the first available one it finds. Since the only other available one is your home wifi, it'll automatically connect to that.

When you leave your garage, the cam will either be connected to your home wifi or nothing (if the cam powered down due to inactivity). Fire up the car, turn on the hotspot (if it doesn't fire up automatically, mine doesn't...) and drive off. The cam will either connect to your hotspot, or it will connect to your home network and then your hotspot after you drive away and it loses its connection to your home wifi. You don't have to do anything extra after you turn the hotspot on, the cam will do it automatically.

The caveat: Having to turn the hotspot in the car on and off manually is a PITA until it becomes a reflex action. My Verizon Jetpack 8800L is not designed to be automobile-specific, so the wifi won't turn on or off automatically when plugged into/unplugged from a live outlet. Most hotspots are like this. There are some hotspots out there that are designed specifically for automobiles and will do that--usually they're designed in a form factor to plug into an OBD-2 port so they can sense when the car is running or not and can turn the wifi on or off accordingly. They can also stay on to allow parking mode use since OBD ports have constant power, but if they never power down then the handoff to the home network can never happen automatically. Verizon doesn't make any like that, I think T-Mobile does (the SyncUp Drive). If you want a wifi handoff without touching anything like you described, you need a hotspot like that. They're not common, and availability is carrier-dependent.

If you don't care about parking mode, you can, of course, use your vehicle's built-in hotspot if you have one. It wakes up when you start the car and goes to sleep when you turn the car off, so the handover to your home network would happen without your intervention. But then you don't have any parking mode.

Everything's a tradeoff...

Is there anyplace in the app that tells me what the current connection is? This app is generally confusing when it comes to connectivity.

Not in the app that I have found, no.

My hotspot has a screen that shows me what devices are attached. Only other way I can think of is to look at the list of devices actively connected to your router.
 
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Well, the cellphone would be a possibility, but I just don’t use it enough to think that this is the likely data leakage. But I’ll keep the possibility in mind as I continue to try to sort things out. Based on your comments, I have changed the setting on the phone, so that it has to ask to connect to the hotspot rather than connecting automatically.

I do have motion detection turned on for parking mode. I’ll have to think about how that could be causing hotspot data traffic. I don’t totally understand why this creates serious amounts of data traffic through my hotspot.

Yes, I read that the design of this hotspot is such that it doesn’t turn on when external power is applied. It’s even more annoying that that. Not only doesn’t the hotspot automatically turn on when the car is turned on. If the hotspot is active when the car is turned on any connected devices are disconnected, and there is no override control that prevents this.

Let me say what I think would be my best setup: I would like the hotspot to remain on, whether the car is on or off, so I that I don’t have to remember this thing and that thing. And, most importantly lol, so that I don’t have to try to get my wife to comply - and she drives the car more often than I do.

Now, I tried removing the battery from the hotspot, to see if the hotspot would operate. It won’t. It powers-up, tells me that there is no hotspot battery, and powers down. So I have to deal with a li-ion battery that is hardwired, if I’m going to hardwire the hotspot. I don’t think that this is a safety concern. I have read an old thread on this topic, and a Verizon agent said that the device may deteriorate in performance over time, due to battery heat generation, but there seemed to be no concern about safety. If I have to replace the 8800L on occasion in order to keep my wife from manual things that she will never do, so be it. Safety is my main concern.

And if I get some time today, I’m going to put an ammeter into the charging cable, plug it into the wall and see what happens with current draw as it gets fully charged. I’m quite sure that this device has a battery charger sort of function built into it and actually as I recall all li-ion chargers have to be this way for safety reasons. So hopefully I’ll have that information to work with.

If continuous charging is safe, then the next question becomes what it does to my car starting battery. If there is a battery charger function built in, I don’t think that there would ever be a problem with the car battery getting drained. And if there is the possibility of my car battery getting drained, I have the option of springing for the $300+ aux battery that Blackvue sells, and I would do this.

So…

Let’s say that I get to the point where I now have a continuously connected 8800L, however I do it. And let’s further say that my cellphone (and my home ipads) won’t automatically connect to the device. Do you see any reason why this won’t give us continuous and automatic service in parking mode, without extraneous disconnecting or data leakage or other gremlins? This is the thing that I really care about: I want to know when the shopping cart crashes into our car in the supermarket parking lot, lol. (Actually happened a couple of years ago and really messed up a painted panel. Fortunately the lady who did it left a note on the windshield - who would have guessed, in this day and age?)
 
Well, the cellphone would be a possibility, but I just don’t use it enough to think that this is the likely data leakage. But I’ll keep the possibility in mind as I continue to try to sort things out. Based on your comments, I have changed the setting on the phone, so that it has to ask to connect to the hotspot rather than connecting automatically.

I do have motion detection turned on for parking mode. I’ll have to think about how that could be causing hotspot data traffic. I don’t totally understand why this creates serious amounts of data traffic through my hotspot.

LOL, maybe it was hers... I've parked in front of a tree on a windy day at work once or twice and gotten the annoying push notifications all. Day. Long... Since I have motion detection cloud upload enabled, every one of those vids went to the cloud. Never did a scientific-ish investigation, but it seems to me that that'd burn a lot of data. Also discovered I shouldn't park with the cam facing a busy road or near the entrance of a busy parking garage... But at least now I know and I can jump into the settings and turn it off for a bit.

Yes, I read that the design of this hotspot is such that it doesn’t turn on when external power is applied. It’s even more annoying that that. Not only doesn’t the hotspot automatically turn on when the car is turned on. If the hotspot is active when the car is turned on any connected devices are disconnected, and there is no override control that prevents this.

Interesting, did not know that. That said, if the hotspot's info is stored in the devices, they should auto-reconnect on their own, wouldn't they?

You can set it to power down after a period of inactivity, which would save battery life. But then the Mrs. would still have to remember to turn it back on when she leaves the house.

Let me say what I think would be my best setup: I would like the hotspot to remain on, whether the car is on or off, so I that I don’t have to remember this thing and that thing. And, most importantly lol, so that I don’t have to try to get my wife to comply - and she drives the car more often than I do.

Now, I tried removing the battery from the hotspot, to see if the hotspot would operate. It won’t. It powers-up, tells me that there is no hotspot battery, and powers down. So I have to deal with a li-ion battery that is hardwired, if I’m going to hardwire the hotspot. I don’t think that this is a safety concern. I have read an old thread on this topic, and a Verizon agent said that the device may deteriorate in performance over time, due to battery heat generation, but there seemed to be no concern about safety. If I have to replace the 8800L on occasion in order to keep my wife from manual things that she will never do, so be it. Safety is my main concern.

And if I get some time today, I’m going to put an ammeter into the charging cable, plug it into the wall and see what happens with current draw as it gets fully charged. I’m quite sure that this device has a battery charger sort of function built into it and actually as I recall all li-ion chargers have to be this way for safety reasons. So hopefully I’ll have that information to work with.

If continuous charging is safe, then the next question becomes what it does to my car starting battery. If there is a battery charger function built in, I don’t think that there would ever be a problem with the car battery getting drained. And if there is the possibility of my car battery getting drained, I have the option of springing for the $300+ aux battery that Blackvue sells, and I would do this.

So…

Let’s say that I get to the point where I now have a continuously connected 8800L, however I do it. And let’s further say that my cellphone (and my home ipads) won’t automatically connect to the device. Do you see any reason why this won’t give us continuous and automatic service in parking mode, without extraneous disconnecting or data leakage or other gremlins? This is the thing that I really care about: I want to know when the shopping cart crashes into our car in the supermarket parking lot, lol. (Actually happened a couple of years ago and really messed up a painted panel. Fortunately the lady who did it left a note on the windshield - who would have guessed, in this day and age?)

Honestly, I don't think that'll be a problem, that's kinda how I do it. A lot of people use these in their RVs and keep them plugged in and running 24/7 with no issues. The JetPack documentation and the Verizon website also say that you can.

I live in southern AZ. I keep mine plugged in all the time to a USB port that's only hot when the car is running. So it's always on from when I leave the garage until I get home and manually turn it off to force the swap to my home wifi. So it charges whenever the car is running, and it's on and the cam is connected all day (8 - 10 hours of parking mode daily at work). Charges while I'm driving to/from work mostly--an hour or so altogether--and that's generally enough to keep it from dying during a normal week of use. Never had it get low enough that I felt I needed to bring it into the house to charge. Never had any heat issues, never had any other malfunctions. That said, it's never in direct sunlight either. I do have a relatively new vehicle with a correspondingly-new high CCA heavy-duty battery, so I'm sure that helps. I never connect anything but the dashcam to it, so YMMV.

The JetPack does charge slower if it's in use while charging. The only drawbacks to your plan I can see from the hotspot standpoint is that if you use it heavily with a lot of connected devices and don't drive often/long enough to keep it charged, that could cause you an issue. Might not have enough juice when you need it to. Connecting it to a battery pack would probably alleviate that. Not something I've ever felt the need for with my usage case. The other drawback is that if it's on all the time, the dashcam will never drop connection to it and find your home wifi. If that doesn't matter to you, then not a problem. Like I said, everything's a tradeoff.

At this point for me, turning it on when I get in the car and off when I get home is just a normal part of the garage departure/arrival checklist.

Catching the shopping cart gremlin is probably going to be more dependent on your camera's field of view than your hotspot setup in this configuration.
 
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Once I get settled in with my cam amd comfortable with app I am thinking of using Automagic app that can do automation on my Android phone to see if I can have it turn on my cell phone hotspot when it detects the BT is paired to my car this way I can leverage the cell phone hotspot and then have it turn the hotspot off once it leave the car.
 
Interesting, did not know that. That said, if the hotspot's info is stored in the devices, they should auto-reconnect on their own, wouldn't they?
Yes, you would think it would. One way or the other, though, it won’t effect me because I did hardwire my hotspot into the car battery. And with one whole day on the job this seems to be the answer for my needs - connection seems solid and my wife doesn’t have to remember to do anything in order to make parking mode work the way I want.

I have a different sort of problem now, in that I keep getting impact notices in normal mode (not parking mode) when I hit a bump or other small disturbance - actually, I can’t even get a definite correlation between the notifications and an associated driving condition, sometimes. I had normal mode sensitivity set to 5. So last night I set it to 2. This seems crazy to have to set it to such a low number (still don’t know if will end the false impact alerts because I haven’t driven the car, since). It makes me wonder if there is a problem of some sort.

I’m wondering if this has anything to do with my having updated to the latest camera firmware, which I did two days ago - my unit came with downlevel camera firmware. Before the update I never got such a warning with sensitivity set to 5. The update itself caused me problems just getting it up and running, and I had to call Blackvue tech support (responsive and helpful). The update problem was an operator problem with the password that I had changed. I didn’t know that I had to take my SD card to a computer and reset the SSID and password.

So, where do you have your impact sensitivity set for normal mode? The car that I’m driving has a relatively stiff suspension and 20” rims (but it also has air suspension, so harsh impacts are softened). I’m a little concerned.
 
I have a different sort of problem now, in that I keep getting impact notices in normal mode (not parking mode) when I hit a bump or other small disturbance - actually, I can’t even get a definite correlation between the notifications and an associated driving condition, sometimes. I had normal mode sensitivity set to 5. So last night I set it to 2. This seems crazy to have to set it to such a low number (still don’t know if will end the false impact alerts because I haven’t driven the car, since). It makes me wonder if there is a problem of some sort.

I’m wondering if this has anything to do with my having updated to the latest camera firmware, which I did two days ago - my unit came with downlevel camera firmware. Before the update I never got such a warning with sensitivity set to 5. The update itself caused me problems just getting it up and running, and I had to call Blackvue tech support (responsive and helpful). The update problem was an operator problem with the password that I had changed. I didn’t know that I had to take my SD card to a computer and reset the SSID and password.

So, where do you have your impact sensitivity set for normal mode? The car that I’m driving has a relatively stiff suspension and 20” rims (but it also has air suspension, so harsh impacts are softened). I’m a little concerned.

You have to reset SSID and PW on a computer? That's new to me. I didn't have to, but that was initial setup 9 months and 3 firmware updates ago.

Your impact sensitivity issue is probably one of the most common complaints about these cams. It's the reason they turned off parking mode impact push notifications for 5 minutes after you park--to stop annoying messages when you close your car doors after you get out. They still get recorded, you just don't get told.

You can turn down sensitivity, turn off notifications, or some combination of both.

I keep G-sensitivity low in normal mode (1/2/2) with notifications off. I figure if something happens while driving, I'm there and the cam is already recording anyway. For live event upload I keep impact detection on and only hard braking of all the other options. I was getting a lot of nuisance notifications for those new cornering/accel/decel/etc. events. I found them annoying. I know what's happening, I'm there. I figure hard braking will catch near misses for youtube idiot shaming entertainment. Now if I had a kid driving the car, I'd probably have all the nannies on.

In parking mode I keep G-sensitivity high (9/9/9) and motion detection on 2. Hopefully that'll catch the careless parkers. Used to have it on 3, but figured out 2 works for me and my work parking is relatively secure. Plus my favorite parking spot is in front of the only tree for a mile. Live upload parking impact notification is on, of course.

I still get some events and notifications I don't want, but a lot less than I used to. Haven't missed on I do want (so far)...

I haven't noticed any differences in notifications over the firmware upgrades once I got it dialed in either.
 
I have set my motion detector all the way down to “1” and the car is in my garage with the door closed (and no squirrels to the best of my knowledge lol) and is getting motion detector notifications every few minutes. The only way I can stop them is to turn motion detection off. I really would like to have a bit of motion detection in parking mode, sigh…
 
I have set my motion detector all the way down to “1” and the car is in my garage with the door closed (and no squirrels to the best of my knowledge lol) and is getting motion detector notifications every few minutes. The only way I can stop them is to turn motion detection off. I really would like to have a bit of motion detection in parking mode, sigh…

Well, that is wierd.

I get motion detection in my garage from my home security cams from moths flying around, but never the car cam.

I'm officially out of ideas...
 
the car is in my garage with the door closed (and no squirrels to the best of my knowledge lol) and is getting motion detector notifications every few minutes.
Lights from passing cars showing through a window? Blinking LED indicators from other devices (including car alarm lights)? Loose garage door moving in the wind? Lights from the house showing through glass in a door? IR lighting from security cams/driveway sensors might also be involved

If you study things deep enough you should be able to find the culprit. If possible set up a cam to constantly record the same view (perhaps from the car roof?) then use time stamps to know which files to watch. Cover the LED indicator on the second cam ;)

Phil
 
Lights from passing cars showing through a window? Blinking LED indicators from other devices (including car alarm lights)? Loose garage door moving in the wind? Lights from the house showing through glass in a door? IR lighting from security cams/driveway sensors might also be involved

If you study things deep enough you should be able to find the culprit. If possible set up a cam to constantly record the same view (perhaps from the car roof?) then use time stamps to know which files to watch. Cover the LED indicator on the second cam ;)

Phil

@SawMaster makes an excellent point here I hadn't thought of...

I have all the LEDs that face outward turned off in the firmware for stealth. I wonder if that blinky forward-facing LED reflecting off your windshield back at the cam is enough to set it off...
 
I wonder if that blinky forward-facing LED reflecting off your windshield back at the cam is enough to set it off...
Tape over it or cover it with some dark paper the light won't pass through. Some cams are more sensitive with this than others.

BTW, enjoying the education I'm getting following this thread (y)

Phil
 
Tape over it or cover it with some dark paper the light won't pass through. Some cams are more sensitive with this than others.

It's a quick and easy turn-off in the firmware.
 
Sawman, thanks. I covered the flashing red light on the top of the dash that operates when the car is locked. That fixed the problem almost entirely.

Kannina 2.0, where in the firmware can I turn off the flashing white light that the device puts out?

I think that I’ve gotten through most of the basics, as far as getting familiar with how this device works and dealing with the early things that come up. I’m happy so far. In spite of the fact that there are various wireless connections and interfaces involved in this setup - meaning plenty to go wrong - it seems rock solid. The Verizon hotspot is rock solid and so is the dashcam. The one time that I used Blackvue technical support it was very accessible and competent. The continuously connected hotspot makes everything transparent to my wife (and me).

I’m at the point where I can set up a Youtube place to store videos, so that we can have some videos for our kids to look see, when we do our over-the-road trips. I do have a question about video resolution. It appears that there are two choices (??), what is called quickplay and what is called high resolution. Kannina, you posted those video clips. They were good. Which resolution were they in? Is quickplay a compression thing or does it seriously lower resolution?
 
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