iroad x10 installation and some DIY stuff.

Casey

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Installed an iRoad x10 in car. It was a hot day (105 degrees) and stuff was so hot we wrapped towels around the rear camera to touch it. Given we have a lot of 110 degree days here (desert), the x10 seemed the best choice to tolerate it given it operates up to 194 degrees (And I have measured its plastic case up to 187 F too!).

Operational, I wasn't too keen on the camera's video colors through the car's stock window tint. Rear window camera gave me a warm red color. Front was over-exposed and looked washed out from glare. Honestly, the rear 2K camera image looked a lot better than the front 4K camera. I have more about that later.

Running the wires was easy going under the rubber door trim. Used a sewing tool called a point turner ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/B00CI571LQ ) that is about the same with of the cable and the handle end slides under the rubber easily with the wire being poked in behind it. The handle end can stuff the wires into areas too.

The wiring supplied was too short by a couple of feet. I cut off their fuses and added smoe more wire. I used the standard Tap-A-Fuse or Add-A-Circuit wires for the always hot 12 volt and another for a switched accessory 12 volt the camera needs. Ground is to bolt on frame.

Mine was the Micro2 fuse tap size like here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/B083V5DYT6
I covered the two wires at the front camera with a plastic loom that matches the interior top upholstery. As the camera was stuck to the passenger side of the window, I fed it over to the right windshield upright.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/B00T56PMGW
As mentioned, the rear camera was too warm (reddish) shooting through tinted window. It is a pain to get to it once it's mounted and glued down as it doesn't have a removable base like the front camera has. I cut a Lee filter #202 Full CTB (~$7 sheet at theatrical lighting shop or online) out of a sheet and taped it into a cylinder to slide over the lens/camera unit. That took care of the reddish tint and made it look a lot better. Exposure is pretty good too. If it is too cool (blue), then a Lee #201 Half CTB (Less blue) would be the next choice.

Rear.jpg

Front camera is a nightmare given the black dashboard's glare and gloss texture. I thought about making up a foam lens hood that could press agaisnt the glass and seal the lens from extraneous light reflections but had little luck. The hood needs to be a 16:9 ratio and very wide given the distance from the windshield to keep from vignetting the sides or edges. I've shot against museum glass windows with a rubber funnel thing on the camera lens which works well, but the dashcam is a bit more challenging.

Option two was going with a polarizer of some sort, but nothing made for the x10 front camera. I found a polarizer sheet on Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/B0793PD7K5 ) and fabricated it so it could slip under the camera's edges where the lens barrel rotates up and down to hold it. The sheet has a front and back backing that peels off and what's left of the polarizer slips between the outer camera case and rotating barrel of the lens snugly.

I put the plastic bag the polarizer came in along with its white labels on the dash and parked the car at noon. By looking through the polarizer sheet and rotating it while starng at the bag and dash, I found a spot where it got rid of most of the glare off the dash and bag from the windshield. I marked the outside covering of the poalrizer to the direction it needed to be cut. Sliced out a 1"x3" piece and slide that over the camera lens. It's fixed so you can't turn it so it's pretty much pot luck on average positioning - but anything is an improvement over the amount of glare I was getting. You can see the polarizer I cut out affixed to the top of the x10 lens here:

Front-with-polarizer.jpg


Software:

On the iRoad Viewer software for Windows, which has much of the control configuration for the cameras in it. The configuration you select is saved onto the microSD card, and you can't do as much from the phone app. I'm not too crazy about their Dark, Normal, and Bright exposure settings as they seem very minimal at best. Maybe something like one-third stop in normal camera land. Needs more variance for me.

There is no ability to alter the tint either like shooting through different window tints that may change the color a bit. Would be nice if iRoad offered a Tint and a White Balance slider in their software so it could be set into the camera via the microSD card. That could get rid of the need to filter the lens.

I had it set to "Auto-Off" at around 12.3 volts. Given that seemed safe for overnight, I lowered it to 12.0 volts and found the car threw up a warning message on the dash telling me "Something added to the car is draining battery" which was startling. New 2020 cars tattle a lot! So I put it back to the 12.3 volt setting. It seems to shut down around midnight and will not make it a full night. Maybe needs a battery pack addition someday, but since it is garaged I'm not in a rush here.

The phone app works better on an Apple iPad. It's more of a viewer though and your cannot set as much of the camera's settings as you can with the Windows software. An Android is a bit finicky (Samsung S10+) as I need to turn it to Airport mode and fiddle with the Wi-Fi a few ties before it would connect to the camera with a "Live View" screen. It gets there, just more temperamental than the iPad. All you can do with the phone apps is view front or camera shot and some minor settings in the main screen by icon in lower right corner. All other video, save, still images, convert from their JDR video format to AVI has to be done on a computer.

I also found a bug in the the Windows Viewer. When you save a clip to a JPG, it really is a BMP file and not a JPG. If you try and edit it in Photoshop or similar, it will report the JPG as unknown. If you rename the JPG to a BMP you can edit it. That bug is with the iRoad Viewer 4.2.4.5 (Dated: March 26, 2020). Hopefully they will fix that bug soon.


Casey-
 
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i'm currently on the fence on buying either the X10 or the X11 but not sure which one to go for, X11 is 2K front and rear while as you probably know X10 is 4K front and FHD Rear.
also X11 has HDR, not sure if its worth it or not.

how is the X10 doing so far with you? any issues ?
 
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