A119 Mounting Angle and Motion Detection

KlueBat

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I've been looking at options for a rear cam on my F150 for a while now. Can someone tell me if the A119 can be mounted on a vertical window? The rear window of my truck is perfectly flat, making choosing a camera tricky.

Also, has anyone run this camera in motion detection mode? The power supply that I have for my front camera is powered at all times, so I'd want to use the A119 as a parking mode device. Will it switch to, and stay in recording mode when I'm driving?

Thanks in advance!
 
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yes, it can be mounted on a vertical window. mount it as high as you can though, maybe even on the headliner so that the lens is right at the top edge of the glass, so you can get maximum rearward visibility over the tailgate. i had a rear camera (not an a119) installed on my factory-lowered Toyota Tacoma X-Runner and trying to read license plates in the back was a waste of time because the tailgate was usually in the way - see the pic below, taken while sitting at a red light. true, this camera was only 720p, but having 1440p wouldn't have made any real difference except in getting plates on vehicles to either side of me, like the white chevy or older dark colored f150. i can imagine it'll be much worse in your F150 since it's a lot taller than my little tacoma was. The white F150 behind me was not too close - he stopped at a normal, comfortable distance and could have driven around me without backing up if he wanted to.

if you have the sliding center section in the back window like the one in the picture below, you may want to figure out a way to attach any camera you put back there to the headliner, whether it's via magnets or a flat bracket attached to the metal roof inside the headliner that sticks out between headliner and glass (this second method is how i attached mine in the tacoma). otherwise you won't be able to open the window anymore.

one other thing to think about - note the raindrop in the upper left. there's no wipers on the back window, so sometimes the camera is rendered completely useless by rain/spray. Rain-X or just plain old car wax helps, but doesn't completely cure it. same problem for when the window fogs up in cold weather - no defroster. but at least in a truck you have a chance of pointing your center vents at the back window to try to clear it.

vlcsnap-2016-10-19-15h05m03s124.png

@abarth has repeatedly stated that motion detection is working perfectly for him. i haven't tried it yet, but when i get time to dig into the wiring, i plan on hooking it up (with a hardwired battery drain prevention device - a MultiSafer) to be powered full time with motion detection enabled. That said, I'll probably also install a second front cam NOT running in motion detect mode, just in case.
 
Yes, it can be mounted on a vertical window. The A119's parking mode is not buffered, it uses motion-detect. You may want to check the differences before proceeding.
 
Yes, it can be mounted on a vertical window. The A119's parking mode is not buffered, it uses motion-detect. You may want to check the differences before proceeding.
good point - not buffered means that in motion mode, when the camera goes into standby (REC light flashing quickly) it's not saving anything. once it "sees" motion, it will start recording but you won't have a record of anything leading up to whatever it saw. better than nothing i suppose, but not a TRUE parking mode. which is why viofo didn't label it as parking mode.
 
Thank you Gibson99 and harsh for your input. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do for a rear cam, so this all helps a lot.

I'll add this to my list of possibilities with the pros and cons for each.
 
...but it does have a time lapse 1FPS mode you could switch it into, without motion detect, when parking so it records constantly but only 1FPS.

Someone will explain what space that will take up, and what, if any, difference to battery drain.
 
...but it does have a time lapse 1FPS mode you could switch it into, without motion detect, when parking so it records constantly but only 1FPS.

Someone will explain what space that will take up, and what, if any, difference to battery drain.
i would guess that 1080p@ 1fps takes up about 1/30th of the space of 1080p30. :p

as for power drain - it might be slightly less, but probably less than 0.05 amps difference... if any difference at all.

the trick is going to be if Viofo can figure out a way to use motion detect to automatically switch between normal recording (1080p30/60/1440p/etc) and time lapse mode, for a proper parking mode. if they can crack that problem, we'll have ourselves a pretty awesome little camera at a great price point!
 
i would guess that 1080p@ 1fps takes up about 1/30th of the space of 1080p30. :p
the trick is going to be if Viofo can figure out a way to use motion detect to automatically switch between normal recording (1080p30/60/1440p/etc) and time lapse mode, for a proper parking mode. if they can crack that problem, we'll have ourselves a pretty awesome little camera at a great price point!

Yes! This would be perfect. That is more or less what my DDPai M6 Plus does up front. The difference is that my DDPai switches to full video on vibration. It is exactly what I'd like my rear camera to do.
 
Yes! This would be perfect. That is more or less what my DDPai M6 Plus does up front. The difference is that my DDPai switches to full video on vibration. It is exactly what I'd like my rear camera to do.
i think that's how my cf-100 works as well - no data from g-sensor for 5 mins = start buffered parking mode (which records using buffered motion detection). i've had it go into parking mode while waiting in a slow drive-thru, and as the line slowly inched forward, i gently rolled forward a few times in pure electric mode (car is a hybrid) and the CF-100 never came out of parking mode. it didn't go to regular mode till we hit a tiny bump in front of the pickup window.

so maybe g-sensor would be a better choice for automatically switching between modes. question is - is the a119's g-sensor sensitive enough for that? the cf-100 records its g-sensor data into the video files and can be viewed using their proprietary app. it's high resolution 3-axis data, probably on the order of 10-15hz sample rate, and the app draws nice easy to read charts as the video plays. it picks up anything from small bumps in the road and normal vibration from driving, all the way up to big stuff like potholes, curbs (like running one over w/ a back tire as you turn), slamming on the brakes, and cornering hard, and it plots them with 3 different colors on the chart.

i've seen other cameras that write the G-sensor data in real time as text at the bottom of the screen, right alongside the timestamp and GPS info. if the G-sensor data was nice and fast, it could be pretty neat to have in a sports car. :)
 
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