Grill Mount

Soccerstyle

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is there a camera that I can mount on the front of my inside the grill instead of the front windshield. Any recomendations.
 
is there a camera that I can mount on the front of my inside the grill instead of the front windshield. Any recomendations.
How will you keep road debris from damaging the lens or covering it?
 
Have a lot of open space on grill right under hood. Should be high enough not to get a lot of debris.
 
Did you ever see what gets stuck in a radiator grill? You may want to make some for of protection. @CheckYourLights how did your bumper mount work out?
 
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I would suggest placing a piece of thick glass or optically clear plastic ahead of the lens. Remember to clean this weekly if not daily. In the rain your cam may see nothing but raindrops. Behind the windshield it can have windshield wipers helping it to see.
 
The Innovv C3 is very popular with the motorcyclists and I haven't read of any complaints from them about road debris or rain on the lens. Some do put them in a waterproof casing, but I think that the majority install them out in the open.
 
Have a lot of open space on grill right under hood. Should be high enough not to get a lot of debris.

Debris is not the big problem here. The problem, regardless of high up you mount the camera is wind driven particles and fine road grit that will pit the glass on the front element of the lens. The solution is to fit a replaceable acrylic or glass protective lens of the proper diameter in front of the camera lens. Affordable lenses of this type in a wide range of diameters are available from www.flashlightlens.com.

DCT member @CheckYourLights has done some great work mounting an Innovv C3 lens module under the front bumper of his vehicle using an HDMI extension cable to get the lens module out to the desired location. He posted his results to a non-public forum here on DCT but maybe he might be willing to share some of his results here. (He may have posted about this elsewhere but I don't recall if or where.)
 
I keep meaning to re-post my write up publicly and it keeps slipping my mind. I have had 3 or 4 people PM me about it. Maybe it could be sticked in the C3 area?

Anyhow here is my write up as posted before. The camera was installed on a 2000 Pontiac Firebird under the bumper in front of the plastic airdam.

Here I will try to go into a little more detail on how I got my C3 installed on the front lip bumper area.

I now have two C3 cameras. This first of the two was used in this install and was ordered from SpyTec and for one reason or another they only carry the 90 Degree shot cable lens so I had to make do.

So I ordered a cable extension from USBFirewire I used the 6 FT straight extension (PART #RR-5S-5F-72G)
Until willy510 had mentioned it I could not find extensions anywhere. I looked on Amazon and eBay with no luck.

So I would like to sneak a note in that if a C4 is developed if it is able to use multiple lenses then I guess the Mini is okay to fit more ports, but a slightly bigger case with a regular size HDMI might be something to look into.

Anyway I had to do a little DIY to pull this off. When I bought my C3 I was trying to use the head mount and the lens holder snapped off of the head mount. So to make the best of a bad situation I was able to pull the soft backing off of the holder and attach some dual lock tape.

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Testing has shown this to stay in place really well. It only came loose one time and that was because this is a very low sitting car, and pulling into a drive the front end hit the dip.
This caused the camera to freeze recording and it needed to be restarted (This has happened twice so far the other time it froze while just being parked up).
To my knowledge


The lens wire is run up near the coolant bottle and hood latch behind the headlight. So far it seems to clear the pop up headlight.
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in front of the battery

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and tucked into a fender hood gap rail.
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This is also where the extension takes over. as you can see it is taped together and taped into the rail so it is protected.

The extension is then run along inside the door
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Then inside the cabin where it just reaches enough to be clipped to where a visor would be.
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Here is the extension being used.
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Here are shots all taken with the camera in this position.
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The C3 did, and I believe still seems to have a bit of a purple flash. It is supposed to only be with one lens and not the other. I think it's the wider lens that does it but I can't remember I only had one lens at the time of the install so I had to work with what I had.
The lens has only fallen once or twice after hitting a dip, and again this is a very low sitting sporty car.

Being this low to the ground also causes some headlights to look like bug eyes when on and the C3 does not have any kind of HDR to help fix this. Still not horrible over all.

Again, and I have mentioned this like a broken record. The C3 is a great idea and Innovv needs to really work the kinks out and head in this direction more with a more polished single channel remote cam and a dual channel remote cam.

Here is what happens when you hit a dip in the road with this set up.
This is with 3M Dual Lock Tape and not the originally included double sided stuff.
It came apart where the two pieces snap together.
 
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Narrow lens had the purple/magenta flashing too. :(
I just re read my own post after pasting it. It seems that I was using the narrow as well for this install at the time from SpyTec sorry about the confusion. Does the wide do this as well?

How will you keep road debris from damaging the lens or covering it?
My brother uses this set up more then I do, but he has never mentioned any lens issues to me, and my original write up was posted back in Nov 2014.
 
Narrow lens / short cable here, and same is the magenta flash.
C3 is on long time outlook in the right side of my car, cant use much of its footage as raindrops mostly obscure the view, and i have not gotten around to treat that side window with some form of "nano water go away stuff".

My C3 sit on the front part of the window in the rear door, and it seem like water droplets like to accumulate there and around the edge of the whole window ( guess that have somthing to do with airflow as middle of window aint so bad )

For outside use i worry more about all the dead bugs than harder objekts hitting it, but i assume build up of dead bugs in summer depend a lot on where you are, and how often you wash your car.
 
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