2 X Mini 2's installed today - parking mode seems poor?

minibbb

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I had two Garmin Mini 2's installed today on my 2019 Mercedes GLC by Halfords in the UK. Cameras were £99 each and to fit front and rear cams only £53 .

I purchased 2X Garmin parking mode cables from Halfords for £20 each (£30 from Garmin). I wasn't aware of the new OBD constant power cable they now do- this may have been an easier install. The chap actually tried to sell me a blackvue instead as that uses the OBD port!!

Both are wired via a fuse box in the boot and seem to work well. A little fiddly to set up the app but got there in the end. Need to work out how to get videos into the vault so I can download them.

I set parking mode up on both. I did 4 hrs at high sensitivity with the pre record function on (not sure how this works with a G shock sensor?!) Hopefully this won't cause too heavy a drain on the battery.

On trying to test parking mode I rocked the car pretty hard via it's roof bars which failed to activate the G shock sensor on either camera- not sure how fair a test this is? Only by lightly flicking the front camera itself did it start recording.

This therefore has me concerned that if someone bumps my car in the carpark it will highly likely fail to activate. We need a youtube review from someone with a couple of scrap cars to test it!!

I'm sure Garmin removed the motion detection due to the over heating issue.

I wonder if motion detection has been removed via hardware or was a software set up.

Can anyone offer any further advice re the usability of the parking mode function and whether it'll likely respond to an actual low speed crash etc?
 
Motion detect pretty much just record all the time, unless you are parked in a garage, or at least a place where there is no movement in sight.

G sensor sensitivity you can test a range of ways, like slapping the glass the camera in installed on, gently flick the camera itself, or as i have also done kick a wheel with the sole of your foot of course as it would otherwise hurt and probably not do the trick,,,, but doing it back then with the cheap B1W did work for me ( kicking a rear wheel )'
you can also try and push hard on the roof line to tilt the car, dont push on a door side as that would just leave a dent, but along the roof line should be strong enough, you can also try to let the parking mode engage with a door open and then close / slam it with increasing force.

G sensor is failed in the way that it still take some force to set it off, so chance are someone could key the whole side of your car and the camera would not sense that as it hardly constitute a G - shock event.
Thats one reason i prefer to use always record low bitrate in the camera i use, though i just use parking guard for 1 hour to cover my shopping, other places i might park i will have good CCTV coverage.

I think motion detect parking also worked fine in the old model, from what i have heard the issue there with the overheating only came trying to change to normal mode, where the camera somehow locked and heated itself up with nothing to do but pull power to stop / reset it, but i still think the parking files was there on the first model of the mini.
BUT ! if motion record all the time, then the camera record all the time and as it is normal bitrate the camera will also be generating as much heat as it can then, making it worse then low bitrate that only use like 5 . 8 mbit or so.

I think the G sensors will do fine at least in regard to a event leaving dents in your car, but no way to tell for sure, you can only try and gauge its sensitivity as i wrote above.
 
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Motion detect pretty much just record all the time, unless you are parked in a garage, or at least a place where there is no movement in sight.

G sensor sensitivity you can test a range of ways, like slapping the glass the camera in installed on, gently flick the camera itself, or as i have also done kick a wheel with the sole of your foot of course as it would otherwise hurt and probably not do the trick,,,, but doing it back then with the cheap B1W did work for me ( kicking a rear wheel )'
you can also try and push hard on the roof line to tilt the car, dont push on a door side as that would just leave a dent, but along the roof line should be strong enough, you can also try to let the parking mode engage with a door open and then close / slam it with increasing force.

G sensor is failed in the way that it still take some force to set it off, so chance are someone could key the whole side of your car and the camera would not sense that as it hardly constitute a G - shock event.
Thats one reason i prefer to use always record low bitrate in the camera i use, though i just use parking guard for 1 hour to cover my shopping, other places i might park i will have good CCTV coverage.

I think motion detect parking also worked fine in the old model, from what i have heard the issue there with the overheating only came trying to change to normal mode, where the camera somehow locked and heated itself up with nothing to do but pull power to stop / reset it, but i still think the parking files was there on the first model of the mini.
BUT ! if motion record all the time, then the camera record all the time and as it is normal bitrate the camera will also be generating as much heat as it can then, making it worse then low bitrate that only use like 5 . 8 mbit or so.

I think the G sensors will do fine at least in regard to a event leaving dents in your car, but no way to tell for sure, you can only try and gauge its sensitivity as i wrote above.
Thanks for such a comprehensive reply and sorry for the delay in responding.

As you suggested I have had a play with the settings- I turned the sensitivity down in the menu to medium for G shock as when driving literally every little bump in th road (being in the UK that happens a lot!) Would cause both cameras to do their annoying little beeps as it flags an incident. This doesn't now seem to happen with it set to medium. It's unclear if parking mode sensitivity is always reduced by doing this? Hopefully not.

By banging on the windscreen where the camera is the parking mode activates and does record a section of footage before. I think a hard impact will be needed though in order to set it off which is a shame however I can see the advantage with not having tonnes of footage being recorded from a motion activated system.

I have had two slight blips with my front camera. Once where it didn't enter parking mode on turning the car off and another when it didn't switch on when starting the car. Hopefully just one offs.....

Sent from my SM-G781B using Tapatalk
 
Yes you will probably have to go to low to stop the when driving G sensor events that are not crash related, the problem then is if the mini just have that one toggle for G sensor then when parked using parking guard your G sensor will also be low sensitivity, and here when parked i prefer to have the G sensor on a hair trigger.

Many systems now have 2 toggles for G sensor, one for when driving and another for when parked using parking guard feature.

But Yeah you should also play around with the camera to get familiar with it and get a feeling for what you can expect from it , if you get in too deep there should be a reset settings to default so you can not really destroy anything playing around.

I assume like CCTV cameras one day the dashcams will have smart motion detect, the CCTV camera i have aimed at my car, and which send notifications to the tablet on my bedside table, fortunately as i like my sleeping when i finally fall asleep the camera have smart motion detect which mean only car or human shapes set off the alarm on my tablet.

If a dashcam with motion could just go off upon seeing those 2 things it would be better, cuz most often motion is way too sensitive so even a cat on a fence 20 M away would set it off.
 
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