DDPai Mola N3

@kelpa32 try to get Mini One for the back view. That model also has parking mode recording, and Starvis sensor ensures your best chance of seeing details (given that back end of the car has darker view than front most of the time). At least you're properly covered front and back.
 
Yesterday I initiated parking recording mode with 12.48v on the battery, started and ran the engine for 15 minutes and then shut off. The camera ran for about 9 hours before shutting off. I had set the timer to 24 hours, so it did not achieve the intended recording time. Which means the voltage cut-off worked as expected. Today when I went to retrieve the camera, the battery terminals read 12.49v.

I think it should be quite safe to set it to 12.0v and give it a try tomorrow. Maybe it will be able to achieve 18 hours of parking recording, but 24 hours seems a bit of a stretch on a small battery like 38B20L.

I tried to bump the car, and then the camera, before removing it. It did not record any events. I tried the same yesterday and it did not record anything as well.

I intend to try 12.0v cut off, and 1 hour parking mode time-out. After 1 hour I'll come back and give the car a thump and see if it records anything. Assuming the voltage cut-off would not have kicked in yet.


PS: When I went back to the car to put up the camera again, I opened the app to change the parking recording settings. This handy notification showed up.

photo_2020-10-26_12-37-17.jpg
 
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I found this explanation in the user manual of the DDPai Mini ONE. I can confirm the Mola N3 behaves similarly based on these priorities:
  1. Battery voltage has not dropped below the cut-off setting (12.4v, 12.0v, 11.8v).
  2. G-sensor if enabled, is always active until condition 1) has been breached.
    1. If condition 3) is active, it will take a snapshot and record normal video for 2 minutes after the G-sensor event and continue with 3).​
    2. If condition 3) is inactive, it will wake the camera and start recording normal videos for 2 minutes and starts action 3). It takes 2-3 seconds to wake the camera up.​
  3. Time lapse/full motion parking recording if enabled, will try to run for as long as you've set the timer for (15m, 1h, 6h, 24h 48h) or until condition 1) has been breached.
This concludes my parking mode testing of the Mola N3 until I have found something else outside of this pattern.
Capture.JPG

On a side note, I've ordered a Mini ONE (for a friend) and will hopefully get to test it out a bit and compare with the Mola N3 before installing it permanently in her car. I've also ordered a Mola A2 (or in China market sold as 9 Eagles A2) from DDPai's Aliexpress official store because it was $32 and has integrated power management. All their parking modes behave in the same way described above, so it's more of an image quality comparison.
 
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I found this explanation in the user manual of the DDPai Mini ONE. I can confirm the Mola N3 behaves similarly based on these priorities:
  1. Battery voltage has not dropped below the cut-off setting (12.4v, 12.0v, 11.8v).
  2. G-sensor if enabled, is always active until condition 1) has been breached.
    1. If condition 3) is active, it will take a snapshot and record normal video for 2 minutes after the G-sensor event and continue with 3).​
    2. If condition 3) is inactive, it will wake the camera and start recording normal videos for 2 minutes and starts action 3). It takes 2-3 seconds to wake the camera up.​
  3. Time lapse/full motion parking recording if enabled, will try to run for as long as you've set the timer for (15m, 1h, 6h, 24h 48h) or until condition 1) has been breached.
This concludes my parking mode testing of the Mola N3 until I have found something else outside of this pattern.
View attachment 53841

On a side note, I've ordered a Mini ONE (for a friend) and will hopefully get to test it out a bit and compare with the Mola N3 before installing it permanently in her car. I've also ordered a Mola A2 (or in China market sold as 9 Eagles A2) from DDPai's Aliexpress official store because it was $32 and has integrated power management. All their parking modes behave in the same way described above, so it's more of an image quality comparison.

So it seems like there's an option of full recording while parking too!

Is it 15 minutes or 2 minutes before switching to time-lapse mode after ACC power OFF?

And yes, please do a comparison for Mola N3 vs Mini ONE vs Mola A2. Thank you!!!
 
On Danish pay roads ( bridges ) you can pay cash / card, or you can have a NFC thing, and lately you can now pay with your license plate.
 
@fisherman10 yes, the option's always been there. It's just that I've never considered 30fps recording as viable for parking recording. You'll run out of space so fast you won't be able to check back what happened yesterday maybe. I don't know why the manual listed 15 minutes. It didn't seem like a logical value for G-sensor recording, but I used a stopwatch to time when the camera woke up and slept and it was 2 minutes 5 seconds or so. It will probably take a bit more investigation to see how different combination of functions will operate.
 
Not good to record normally 24/7, but in trying it with many cams I haven't killed any yet :cool: Sometimes in the worst summer heat they will 'freeze up' and require a restart to work again. It seems especially tough on cams with LiPo batteries instead of supercaps as battery wear goes like it's been turbocharged o_O It doesn't seem to affect the cards other than using their service life up faster as you'd expect. It voids your warranties and thus isn't recommended ;)

Phil
 
@fisherman10 first impression comparison with Mini One is posted here! The A2 is still in transit, so let's see when it gets here. From other footage samples on YouTube, the A2 doesn't look good at all, but let's see when it comes. Will also work on getting the night footage, and getting the Mini One hooked up to the fusebox for parking mode tomorrow.

 
Some further info. Based on FCC internal photos of the Mola N3, the main SOC is HiSilicon Hi3556 V200. Nice big heat-spreader and supercapacitor has a connector for easy removal.


Based on the SOC datasheet, this chip has 2x 900MHz Cortex A7 CPUs, built on 28nm process and has embedded 1Gb (128 MB) DDR3L RAM. Hardware encoding for H.265 and H.264 is present, as is lens distortion correction.

 
I put a USB meter to the port today and measured between 2.2w to 2.6w power consumption by the Mola N3 GPS. I suppose the non-GPS variant will be slightly less power consuming (5.13v 0.44A - 5.13v 0.51A).

This is somewhat (~40%) more than the Mini One I'm running at the same time which read 1.7w stable (5.13v 0.33A). So yeah if you wanted to run one overnight on a USB powerbank, it's clear which model you ought to take.
 
Some further info. Based on FCC internal photos of the Mola N3, the main SOC is HiSilicon Hi3556 V200. Nice big heat-spreader and supercapacitor has a connector for easy removal.


Based on the SOC datasheet, this chip has 2x 900MHz Cortex A7 CPUs, built on 28nm process and has embedded 1Gb (128 MB) DDR3L RAM. Hardware encoding for H.265 and H.264 is present, as is lens distortion correction.

wow! That is a HUGE heat spreader!

Meanwhile the B1W has none. Haha
 
250 x 250 px samples taken from still shots taken by Mola N3 vs Mini One. The "corner quarter" areas are based on the rule of third points. Each camera applies pretty different processing idea, I think. The Mola N3 oversharpens a bit while the Mini One seems to prefer to reduce noise more. The exposure bias and white balance are also quite different [if you refer to video footages (Mola N3 vs Mini One) it's also evident there]. Overall I think this is a win for OmniVision's 5MP sensors (I dug around the firmware update files, seems to have reference to OS05A series sensors, but hey I may be wrong).

Crops.png
 
seem like Mola N3 is value buy for it's price point.
 
@kelpa32 so far it's looking good, below RM300 for GPS, hardwire kit, parking mode, supercap. The components seem to be similar to Mini 3, which is RM100 more and no GPS logger available. The Mini 3 has more heavy-lifting CPU power though, the Hi3556 V100 is a big.LITTLE arrangement with 1.25 GHz Cortex A17 + 800 MHz Cortex A7. Not that it does anything useful with the extra horsepower, there's no ADAS function like what's found in the Mola N3. Both are likely using the same OS05A10 sensor.

PS: Cross-reference to another post with some comparison about SOC used in some DDPai models currently on sale.
 
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@fisherman10 I think at this point there's really no need to do a side by side comparison between Mini One, A2 and Mola N3. If you're in this price range, just go for Mola N3. Already the GPS logger is a bonus at this price. The difference in their hardware also heavily favours the Mola N3 (H.264 encoder with 100 Mbps limit, 14.5 MB/sec file, OS05A10 5MP/1600p sensor). The Mini One and A2 seem to be sharing the same architecture with Hi3516-based SoC, H.264 encoder limited to 30 Mbps, 2MP/1080p sensors. Even if the Mini One's IMX307 sensor might be more sensitive at night, the encoder limitations is not able to make the best use of it. The A2 is further crippled with a lower grade sensor.
 
Cross-reference to final posting for Mini One with comparison with Mola N3.

 
@fisherman10 I finally received the A2 and here's my initial report on it.

 
After unlocking H.265 encoding feature in the A2 dashcam (in an attempt to improve the output quality due to bitrate-limited hardware video encoder), I decided to try do the same with the Mola N3. Annoying the km/h embed feature has disappeared. You can only see the speed from the playback screen overlaid by the app. Also, all spoken notifications are now in Mandarin. From the video sample, the gains seems to be more limited compared to the A2. When car is stationary and scene isn't moving, the bit rate drops from 14.5 MB/sec to 13.4 MB/sec.

Overall, I think it is better to keep the export firmware. The key benefit of having the GPS mount is now gone. Also, I'm not able to find the export firmware for download as to flash it back so it looks like I'm stuck for now.

 
Overall, I think it is better to keep the export firmware. The key benefit of having the GPS mount is now gone. Also, I'm not able to find the export firmware for download as to flash it back so it looks like I'm stuck for now.
I also installed firmware 7.0.1.13 instead of 7.0.0.7, the ability to track the track was lost. The firmware was downloaded from the site ddpai.com, there was no division by version !!
The result of a 3-day struggle. On 7.0.0.7 it does not roll back in any way, I tried 3 sd cards with and without reset and 3 different versions of the application ..
The track does not write, it does not even create a GPS folder on sd card anymore ..
 
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@BigDaddyUK that's unfortunate isn't it. Let's hope they fix it in a future version. The file I flashed is 20201109035016_640769.zip.
 
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