ITB500-HD install

[mituc]

Today I've installed the second ITB500-HD in my wife's car, a Smart ForFour (similar with the Mitsubishi colt). I thought about taking some pictures quite late in the install process, but since more than half of it was about moving the power cable from under the driver's seat under the passenger's seat I think it's fine.

Now, here is how the passenger side pas looking like:


The power cable and camera cables under the passenger seat and under the passenger side molding:


How, the rear camera cable install process:





Incoming FAIL ?:


Mother nature rescued my install process



Front camera - final position:


That's where the GPS will stay, passenger side pillar:


Important note: if you have side airbags make sure you put anything in there AWAY from the airbag. If you have any cables in that area make sure you slide them under the airbag. That's what I had to do when I installed the DVR on my other car, a 2008 Mazda 3 (pictures later in the post).
I never prepare myself for an impact nor I buy the car thinking of an impact. But these are things that can happen and if an airbag deploys it better not hit you with cable remains or GPS sensors in the face at 200m/s.

...Making the rear camera cable look nice and neat...:


And that's the DVR under the side passenger seat with a piece of velcro on its belly (it's dark in there, the phone camera did not focus on the right spot):



This is how it looks now:


I never took pictures during the first install in my other car. I was too busy getting it right, but here are a few pictures with the cameras and DVR installed:

 

[Mitch]

This is a very neat install and proper method of placing and hiding all the cables!

 

[mituc]

A typical install takes somewhere between 2 and 3.5 hours, depending on how well you already know your car trims and pillars, how easy can they be taken off, and how well you did your homework prior to the install: what goes where, cables install order, fuse box layout, additional tools and materials (velcro, insulation tape, cutters, screw drivers of all kind, and so on).

In my both cases the power cables for the DVRs were installed by professionals which I fully recommend if you're not sure what to do or if you think the best solution is to split some existing wires form the roof lights. I could have done that myself as well but I decided I should not fully trust myself working with the un-fused electrical cables and ask a pro to install the wire and a fuse on it. I only took care of the actual DVR installation.

And always disconnect the car battery during these installs just in case. If **** happens you'd rather have the fan powered down.

 

[mituc]

Here are the settings that look ideal to me for this DVR. These settings may work for other Itronics cameras as well, as i can see people keeping complaining about sensitivity issues:
1. Driving mode:
- recording quality 720p;
- front camera brightness: normal;
- rear camera brightness: bright;
- shock sensitivity while driving: OFF - it's so annoying so have event files created every time there's a small crack in the asphalt!
- display speed: I prefer it set to on since I basically never use the player for anything else than changing settings;

2. Parking mode:
- ON;
- activate only on shock;
- Shock sensitivity while parking: sensitive - this will make the DVR start recording even when a bug touches the windscreen or the wind blows harder. While it's raining this will result basically into continuous recording, but even if we configured the DVR to record on motion detection we'd still have the same behavior. So only shock here;

3. General settings:
- shock sensing alarm - OFF. We're not using this impact sensor anywhere anyway. I activated it once when I configured the shock sensor to "insensitive", and it was still beeping like crazy even when I was accelerating harder.

I added my setup fine as an attachment for those who need it. I think you only need to change the time zone, currently set to Moscow, GMT+3, because this thing doesn't seem to know about daylight saving and leaving the timezone seto to my location (Bucharest) would make the time readings to appear as one hour earlier.