A119 V2 locks up in my Tesla.

[DAP]

Have you gone back to the factory firmware yet from the Viofo website?

If not that should be the first thing you do next.

Not yet, I'll eventually get to that.

Are you still running it 24x7 due to the Tesla wiring ?

It is not 24/7, but it is on a lot longer that any other car. It turns on in the morning as soon as I open the door, and I don't believe it turns off during the day due to sentry mode being on. So it is on a lot longer that it was in my old car, but it still turns off every night.

 

[Kremmen]

Just wondered because the reports do highlight 2 things:

1) These cameras get quite hot so a shutdown after a journey must help.

2) SD cards only have a limited life so writing to them for hours on end every day will likely cause earlier than expected failure.

 

[DAP]

Interesting update: I had turned off the screen saver to make it easier to tell when it had locked up. Today I found that the screen saver had been turned back on. I know I did not do it, and noone else uses my car, so I'm no sure how this happened.

 

[DAP]

Update: I think I know what is wrong. The display started flickering, I started getting error messages, and the camera re-booting. I moved the power cable from the GPS mount to the camera itself, and the flickering and rebooting went away. I think there is a loose connection in the GPS mount. I will have to disassemble the mount to see if I can fix it. That will have to wait until the weekend.

 

[Kremmen]

.... or buy a new mount ?

 

[DAP]

If I can't repair it, I am more likely to buy a new camera. I'm looking for a good 4K camera anyway. (not interested in any dual cameras, I prefer the redundancy of separate front and rear cameras in parallel with the telsas 4 cameras).

 

[DAP]

I took apart the GPS. The unit passes power to the camera through some ferrite beads. The GPS is an off the self unit that is just wired to the custom power circuit board. It runs on 3.3V. USB power is 5V, so it does not connect directly to the USB power. It gets its power from the camera.
The only thing I could see that might have been the issue is that the contact for the USB power between the GPS and the camera did not stick up as much as the other contacts. I bent that pin up a bit to match the others.
Since I did not see anything I could definitively point to as being the problem in the GPS, I opened up the camera. The GPS connector on the camera is connected to the rest of the camera via a flex cable with ZIF connectors at each end. I did not see anything wrong here either but just in case there was a contact issue with the flex connectors I reversed the flex cable so that each signal would be on different wires in the flex cable, and the connectors would contact at different points.
I now have the camera powered up through the gps unit, and there does not currently appear to be a problem with it.
Now I have the nasty task of cleaning the old adhesive off my windshield so I can re-install the camera.
Before I do though, I will put the latest firmware on the camera.

 

[DAP]

Fixing the power issue did not fix the lockup issue.

 

[Kremmen]

Are you still running the cam 24x7 ?

 

[DAP]

Are you still running the cam 24x7 ?

I have never run it 24x7. It always shuts down in my garage at night. I don't know for sure if it stays on all day when sentry mode is on.

 

[Kremmen]

OK

I was just thinking that it may be hitting the card too hard if it was 24x7

 

[DAP]

OK

I was just thinking that it may be hitting the card too hard if it was 24x7

I bought a new high endurance card, same problem.

 

[Kremmen]

Assuming the cam hasn't got an issue the only other thing I can think of is - are you wired to a circuit that briefly cuts power every now and again. I know on petrol stop/start cars you have to be very careful which circuit you use because even a few milliseconds power cut, like when the starter motor is triggered, can cause the unit to think it's in power down. Then power is restored during power down and it gets confused.

Tesla, being all electric, may have some new way of doing things.