A139 for Uber / Lyft Customizations

[starbl]

Hey @VIOFO-Support and everyone, couple of questions/suggestions.

First off, I love the dashcam, when it works. I've had small issues with it when it comes to not recording (I'm using a Sandisk PRO Endurance 256GB) and it freezing up.

First, some background. I uber/lyft/rideshare/airport taxi. I run all 3 channels at the best quality. What I want to do is mimick what my Blackvue does when I park because my blackvue, even after spending the ~$500 doesn't notify me when the interior camera is unhooked, nor does it do the bitrate that the A139 does. My unit is hardwired into my car using the HK3.

I want to offload the videos from the camera as much as possible. I have a 50TB NAS in the basement that has a few scripts that calls wget and tries to grab as much off of the A139 as it can while it's there. The reason is that with as much rideshare/uber I do, I generate ~20GB of data an hour. I'm sure you can do the math on how long the footage stays on the SD card when I'm generating that amount of data.

Right now, I have to unhook it from the hardwire kit, let it power down, and then power it back up just to get it to engage station mode, or leaving my car on, turning off wifi (if on), stopping recording, turning on station mode and then going in.

I'm looking for the following to happen:

When I park my car, it enters parking mode, turns on Wifi Station mode for 60 seconds. If it doesn't see the SSID broadcast, turn it off. If it sees the SSID, connect up and hang out there like it would if I manually turned it on. the 60 seconds was chosen for the simple fact of conservation of energy. It could be left to the 5 minutes just for coding simplicity.

Now, a couple of questions:

I see there's a FTP port open, where can I find the username/password to access it? I would rather do this than HTTP/wget, as it's more interactive and reliable with file transfers.

Is there anything else I can do to make it easier to enable station mode?

Is there anything I can do to address the heat issues? Even though I live in Wisconsin and I only deal with the summer a few months out of the year, I've noticed that it slows down quite significantly when the unit gets hot, even when in parking mode and in my garage with strong-wifi.

Other things I've noticed:

When downloading via wget, protected files (RO/Parking) do not allow for the files to resume downloading. Only the main files do. Why is that?
Also -- when downloading and trying to use the "Remove" link for protected files -- it wont allow it to be deleted. The only way I can delete them is to go onto the app and unlock them, pull the card from the camera and delete on the computer, OR format via the app/manually. I understand it's probably just protection from being deleted -- but if I -- the user -- is asking for them to be deleted, it should do what I ask it to.

Thanks in advance!

 

[rgbdct]

Pardon my replying without answering the question, but how did you set up your current backup configuration? If you followed a guide, could you share it?

 

[starbl]

There wasn't really a guide.

Here's the code I used... mind you, I've adapted it for TrueNAS/FreeBSD, so, there may be a directory thing here or there...

#!/bin/bash
ping -c2 -i3 (dashcam IP)
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
rm /vd1/dashcam/viofo/(dashcam IP)/DCIM/Movie/index.html
wget --append-output=/var/log/wget.log --retry-connrefused --no-parent --timeout=3 -P /vd1/dashcam/viofo -r http://(dashcam ip)/DCIM/Movie/ --reject "*_F*" --reject "*_R*" >> /var/log/wget.log
rm /vd1/dashcam/viofo/(dashcam IP)/DCIM/Movie/index.html
wget --append-output=/var/log/wget.log --retry-connrefused --no-parent --timeout=3 -P /vd1/dashcam/viofo -r http://(dashcam ip)/DCIM/Movie/ --reject "*_R*" --reject "*_I*" >> /var/log/wget.log
rm /vd1/dashcam/viofo/(dashcam IP)/DCIM/Movie/index.html
wget --append-output=/var/log/wget.log --retry-connrefused --no-parent --timeout=3 -P /vd1/dashcam/viofo -r http://(dashcam ip)/DCIM/Movie/ --reject "*_I*" --reject "*_F*" >> /var/log/wget.log
rm /vd1/dashcam/viofo/(dashcam IP)/DCIM/Movie/index.html
wget --append-output=/var/log/wget.log --retry-connrefused --no-parent --timeout=3 -P /vd1/dashcam/viofo -r http://(dashcam ip)/DCIM/Movie/
rm /vd1/dashcam/viofo/(dashcam IP)/DCIM/Movie/index.html
rm /vd1/dashcam/viofo/(dashcam IP)/DCIM/Movie/Parking/index.html
wget --append-output=/var/log/wget.log -c --retry-connrefused --no-parent -P /vd1/dashcam/viofo -r http://(dashcam ip)/DCIM/Movie/Parking/ >> /var/log/wget.log
rm /vd1/dashcam/viofo/(dashcam IP)/DCIM/Movie/RO/index.html
wget --append-output=/var/log/wget.log -c --retry-connrefused --no-parent -P /vd1/dashcam/viofo -r http://(dashcam ip)/DCIM/Movie/RO/ >> /var/log/wget.log
rm /vd1/dashcam/viofo/(dashcam ip)/DCIM/Movie/RO/index.html

exit 0
else echo “”
fi

Seems weird, but here's the jist of it.
1) Checks to see if it's online.
2) All the rm index.html's, for some reason, wget will pull the old index.html and then not grab new files, hence the housekeeping.
3) It will pull all the interior footage first, as that's the most important to save -- if someone claims I did something bad, I need the interior footage first.
4) Then it pulls the front, and then the rear.
5) Last, it pulls the Parking footage and the locked file footage for the reasons above. If the camera downloads everything, it will always redownload the Parking and the RO footage because the web interface can't delete files -- and for whatever reason -- it can resume the normal footage, but the internal webserver on it pukes with the locked files -- causing an error loop that wget can't figure out.

Yes, it throws it in one huge directory for now, eventually I'll write a script to move it into date folders.

There is a secondary cronjob that I every half an hour or so --

30 * * * * find /vd1/dashcam/ -name "*del=1" -type f -size -160k -delete > /dev/null 2>&1

Because of the nature of wget, it grabs all the Remove links from the webpage as separate files. This just cleans those up.

 

[starbl]

Oh, and I forgot to mention -- I use "flock" to make sure I don't run more than one of these scripts at a time -- so my cronjob looks like this.

*/5 * * * * flock -n /tmp/viofo.lock bash /root/viofo.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

 

[mentadent]

What kind of speed are you getting? It takes about 30 minutes to download one 500MB video for me, about 10 meters away on 5GHz.

 

[starbl]

What kind of speed are you getting? It takes about 30 minutes to download one 500MB video for me, about 10 meters away on 5GHz.

Get a fan on your dashcam. I found that the hotter it got, the slower the transfer speeds were.

I was averaging about 7MB/sec on 5Ghz with 80mhz channel width. It got down to 3MB/sec if I didn't put the fan on it.

 

[mentadent]

Getting a solid 35/sec on my Mikrotik Audience from inside my house to car outside, on 5GHz. My router has two 5GHz too so I can dedicate one to that. I have no use for it but fun. I do have dashcam when parked recording to BlueIris CCTV for fun too.

 

[starbl]

35 what a second? 35 Megabits a second is 3.5Megabytes a second and that's what I was getting when the camera was hot. 7 MB/sec is 70 Megabits a second.

 

[mentadent]

This may be useful:

HTTP Remote

Read only remote for HTTP servers

rclone.org

Rclone can mount a remote HTTP directory listing as a virtual drive. This could be useful for peoples' syncing plans.

 

[viofo]

Hey @VIOFO-Support and everyone, couple of questions/suggestions.

First off, I love the dashcam, when it works. I've had small issues with it when it comes to not recording (I'm using a Sandisk PRO Endurance 256GB) and it freezing up.

First, some background. I uber/lyft/rideshare/airport taxi. I run all 3 channels at the best quality. What I want to do is mimick what my Blackvue does when I park because my blackvue, even after spending the ~$500 doesn't notify me when the interior camera is unhooked, nor does it do the bitrate that the A139 does. My unit is hardwired into my car using the HK3.

I want to offload the videos from the camera as much as possible. I have a 50TB NAS in the basement that has a few scripts that calls wget and tries to grab as much off of the A139 as it can while it's there. The reason is that with as much rideshare/uber I do, I generate ~20GB of data an hour. I'm sure you can do the math on how long the footage stays on the SD card when I'm generating that amount of data.

Right now, I have to unhook it from the hardwire kit, let it power down, and then power it back up just to get it to engage station mode, or leaving my car on, turning off wifi (if on), stopping recording, turning on station mode and then going in.

I'm looking for the following to happen:

When I park my car, it enters parking mode, turns on Wifi Station mode for 60 seconds. If it doesn't see the SSID broadcast, turn it off. If it sees the SSID, connect up and hang out there like it would if I manually turned it on. the 60 seconds was chosen for the simple fact of conservation of energy. It could be left to the 5 minutes just for coding simplicity.

Now, a couple of questions:

I see there's a FTP port open, where can I find the username/password to access it? I would rather do this than HTTP/wget, as it's more interactive and reliable with file transfers.

Is there anything else I can do to make it easier to enable station mode?

Is there anything I can do to address the heat issues? Even though I live in Wisconsin and I only deal with the summer a few months out of the year, I've noticed that it slows down quite significantly when the unit gets hot, even when in parking mode and in my garage with strong-wifi.

Other things I've noticed:

When downloading via wget, protected files (RO/Parking) do not allow for the files to resume downloading. Only the main files do. Why is that?
Also -- when downloading and trying to use the "Remove" link for protected files -- it wont allow it to be deleted. The only way I can delete them is to go onto the app and unlock them, pull the card from the camera and delete on the computer, OR format via the app/manually. I understand it's probably just protection from being deleted -- but if I -- the user -- is asking for them to be deleted, it should do what I ask it to.

Thanks in advance!

The latest firmware is supported keeping station mode in parking mode. But if no connection, it will disable WiFi after 10 mins.

The camera does not support FTP access, only support HTTP server, and please stop recording before you downloading files from the camera via http.