B40 / A118 / AE-CC30 Mounted in your Car. ( Photos )

[Gibson99]

i would take off the screen protector (and make sure they took the protector off the lens too) before it becomes a sticky mess due to heat.

also, what function does the vent on top of the mirror provide? other than the vent, it looks just like every other compass/temp/autodim mirror i've ever seen. and i've installed plenty of them, having worked at a toyota dealer for several years.

 

[clammydog]

Yes I took off the screen protector right after I took the photo. There's a protector on the lens? I couldn't see one but I'll double check thanks.

I have no idea what those vents are for. Maybe it has something to do with the Bluetooth mic?

 

[Gibson99]

yes, my a118 had a little protector on the lens in addition to the one on the screen. i suggest you mark a tiny dot on the body of the camera so you know where the lens points, so you can move it around easier without having to fiddle with trying to aim it on the little screen (assuming it's aimed properly now).

that's possible (BT mic). usually toyota hides the mic in the little roof console where things like map lights and sunroof controls go (looks like a tiny vent), but i've never sat in a venza before so i don't know. i quit working for toyota just before the venza came out.

 

[clammydog]

That's a very good idea about marking the lens location. I'm amazed on how wide a angle that lens is. I can see everything and then some.

 

[Gibson99]

also something to think about - is there enough slack in the power cord for you to unplug it? i ask since the SD card slot is blocked by the mirror's wire cover, so you'll have to remove the camera to get footage off it for any reason.

 

[clammydog]

There's lots of slack to remove the plug. I connect my netbook to the B40 to transfer video files. It all works like a charm (so far).

 

[dirtymoney]

There's lots of slack to remove the plug. I connect my netbook to the B40 to transfer video files. It all works like a charm (so far).

How does your netbook handle playing the videos? Mine cant play them very well. I have to transfer them to a computer at my work to play them or just hook up the dashcam to a portable tv to play them from the camera.

I use an older dell mini 9 (widows xp). I love the thing and wont replace it til it dies. I love netbooks, but since the tablet craze netbooks are not popular or as available anymore.

 

[Gibson99]

some netbooks just don't have the horsepower to decode full hd videos. you can try installing the k-lite codec pack (full) to see if it helps since the k-lite codecs are more efficient than the stock windows ones, but don't get your hopes up. these little cameras can handle full HD because they have single-purpose chipsets specifically made for HD video, whereas a netbook just has low-end general-purpose PC parts. so while the camera does great with video, if you were to somehow try to run something like excel on it, it would choke.

it would be kinda neat if someone made a camera that could link up with your home wifi and auto-archive the day's videos to a specified server/pc/network share every day, but that would of course require constant 12vdc, not just the little battery in the camera. similar to automatic cloud sync, just a "private cloud", as it were... and wifi, not cellular, so cheaper and potentially faster.

 

[clammydog]

How does your netbook handle playing the videos? Mine cant play them very well. I have to transfer them to a computer at my work to play them or just hook up the dashcam to a portable tv to play them from the camera.

I use an older dell mini 9 (widows xp). I love the thing and wont replace it til it dies. I love netbooks, but since the tablet craze netbooks are not popular or as available anymore.

Not very good. Video is jumpy. Just like you I had to transfer the files to my desktop to view them properly.

What would be really great is a micro sd EyeFi card. Too bad there's no such thing.

 

[David106]

.............it would be kinda neat if someone made a camera that could link up with your home wifi and auto-archive the day's videos to a specified server/pc/network share every day, but that would of course require constant 12vdc, not just the little battery in the camera. similar to automatic cloud sync, just a "private cloud", as it were... and wifi, not cellular, so cheaper and potentially faster.

Why would you want to archive the video every day? I find that 99% of the time there is nothing of note worth keeping, plus saving that amount of video will need serious storage capacity.

 

[Gibson99]

true but i can think of a few use cases where you'd want to prevent tampering. i'm sure there are more but here are two i just came up with:

fleet managers would want to do it, and could afford a few TB worth of drive space for it.

also parents who want to keep tabs on their kids would, too. kid says he's going to the "library" but footage shows he went to his girlfriend's house nowhere near the library? well, the way my dad grounded us from our car was to take off the wire from the ignition coil to the distributor cap and take it to his office downtown, so we couldn't simply pop it back on and go. nowadays nothing has a distributor but there are plenty of other parts just as easy to remove that would disable it... like the mass air flow meter or a coil pack or two. or just a main fuse or relay!

setting up auto-purge is also easy. i wrote a script to purge backups from the servers at work after 30 days. set it up as a scheduled task (or chron job if you like) to run daily. basically the script looks at the creation date of each file in a given directory, and if the date is older than today-30, it deletes it.

considering that storage is so cheap these days, it's no big deal to dedicate 100-200 gigs for storing dashcam footage. i know i'm not the norm in that i have a dell poweredge server in my garage, which has 6 x 600gb drives in raid 5 for about 3TB of total space (i run several VMs for testing/teaching myself stuff), but even a typical home PC comes with a 1TB drive now.

 

[kate]

View attachment 7312 View attachment 7313 View attachment 7314 2010 Toyota Venza. Professional installation done by my Toyota dealer. Very discreet and not noticeable from outside the vehicle. I have a toll road transponder installed on the other side of the B40.
View attachment 7309 View attachment 7310 View attachment 7311 View attachment 7309 View attachment 7309 View attachment 7310

Nice set up!
I will take a pic of mine once it starts working! brrr...

 

[Ramma2]

New A118 install today. First dash cam, first setup. I'm pretty impressed so far.

Vehicle is 2011 Ford Focus SE

Inside View:

Outside, basically invisible (due in part to heavy cloud cover probably)

Outside close up

Action snapshot:

 

[mike-k]

And here's mine... Very prominent at the Windshield, unfortunatly... At least it's completly out of MY view while driving:

 

[Super6O]

Received my A118 from Spytec / Amazon.com this afternoon. Mounted it in my '04 Dodge Ram:
Untitled by super6O, on Flickr

Untitled by super6O, on Flickr

The windshield in this truck is sloped and fairly long so the reflection is very pronounced. I will probably need to relocate (replace) my toll tag as it shows in the wide angle recording in it's current spot.

 

[Caerus]

Here's mine. I finally had some time to properly clean up the wiring. It's discrete"ish". The camera does tuck away nicely, but as you can see from the full car pic, on a sunny day, you can easily see it even from a distance. But, it's still more hidden than having a big rectangle attached to a suction cup.

 

[Jason Lim]

Hardwired up the dashcam and here's my setup on a 2013 Honda Insight JDM (RHD)


Cam view from the dash in daytime. (1280x720, HDR on, EV 0, WB auto)

 

[robertk328]

Nice. What's the other box up there?

 

[Jason Lim]

That's a rain sensor of the auto wipers.

Nice. What's the other box up there?

 

[Gibson99]

Why only 720 instead of 1080?