Failed from too much high temperature use?
Since you asked, Nigel, I thought you'd find this interesting. Maybe you have some thoughts on what's going on?
After trying three different perfectly good super-capacitor modules in my M1S camera and re-setting the camera's configuration parameters each time (it syncs the time & date settings from your computer) I still couldn't get the camera's date and time not to default to 12/31/21, the apparent date of manufacture of the SoC.
So the problem was not a bad super-cap after all.
From there, things get a little weird. I tried reformatting the 128 GB Samsung EVO select memory card I've been using for about a year and nothing changed. The card gets formatted using the disk utility on my PC to ExFat which is required for the Mobius if using a card larger than 64 GB. The camera's built-in formatting capability can only handle FAT32. When the camera's interface was first designed 128 GB cards were not compatible with the camera, nor were they widely available or affordable. This did nothing to help the problem.
Finally, I installed a brand new 128 GB SanDisk High Endurance card in the camera and now it keeps the date and time as normal. (at least so far)
There are several curious things going on here. There is nothing obvious wrong with the original Samsung EVO card. Despite not recording the correct date & time, all of the video clips and audio were recorded as normal. Aside from this, the memory card is not where the date and time is usually stored anyway. Otherwise, you couldn't just pop a fresh new memory card into the camera on the fly and be on your way.
I've never encountered this behavior before in any of the many Mobius camera models I've owned.
Nevertheless, Mobius cameras do not work like regular dash cams. For one thing, they do not have a RTC battery, instead relying on the super-capacitor to retain the date and time in the camera's memory for 7-10 days.
The camera is programed via PC using a GUI utlity called mSetup, which essentially writes a
SYSCFG.TXT file to the camera
. This file can be transferred to the installed memory card and then back to a PC where you can manually edit the file with any simple (ASCII) text editor and then load it back into the camera. This allows the user to change the camera's configuration without using the GUI.
It is possible that there is some sort of glitch with writing the data or holding this data in the camera's memory, except that all the other settings remain intact.
Still scratching my head here.
I've been doing a complete low level format of the original Samsung EVO card using SD Card Formatter as I'm curious to see if this affects the date and time issue but AFAIK the SYSCFG.TXT file only gets transferred to the card manually after a serious of intentional button presses.