Mobile Wi-Fi and F800Pro - Possible? How much data consumption?

Xethar

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Hello. I would like to know if F800Pro would be able to connect to a portable mobile wifi.

I have a TP Link M7650 and I would like to know if the recording camera in parking mode can connect to it in order for me to stream video to my phone from far away.

Also, I'm curious of what data usage will it spend if I connect a few times a week and stream some video from my phone. Would like 5gb be enough? Or maybe more?

Thanks for the info. I will update this thread if I find any info somewhere else.
 
As far as the latest firmware version, the camera will turn Wifi off in parking mode (presumably to save power) – so it’s not possible to stream and/or connect with the camera remotely.

The only way thinkware could go around that, while keeping power usage down, will be to enable wowlan (wake on wireless lan) trigger – if the hardware is capable. I am not sure if they have any plans on doing that.

The other option will be to connect the acc wire to the battery, which will keep the camera running fully all the time - not the best idea since will be taxing on your battery.

Or, a possible third alternative will be for you to install a remotely controlled relay(rf, wifi, bluetooth) on the acc wire – to wake your camera on demand.

Larry
 
As far as the latest firmware version, the camera will turn Wifi off in parking mode (presumably to save power) – so it’s not possible to stream and/or connect with the camera remotely.

The only way thinkware could go around that, while keeping power usage down, will be to enable wowlan (wake on wireless lan) trigger – if the hardware is capable. I am not sure if they have any plans on doing that.

The other option will be to connect the acc wire to the battery, which will keep the camera running fully all the time - not the best idea since will be taxing on your battery.

Or, a possible third alternative will be for you to install a remotely controlled relay(rf, wifi, bluetooth) on the acc wire – to wake your camera on demand.

Larry
Even on the latest firmware it is still unable to stream via a hotspot other that the phone or tablet that’s providing internet. In other words, it is still not possible to remotely connect to the camera. My F800 Pro connects to my car’s hotspot automatically to obtain internet, and so does my phone. But I am unable to communicate with my camera via the app or any other way all though in the same network. Maybe in the future remote connection would be possible.
 
Even on the latest firmware it is still unable to stream via a hotspot other that the phone or tablet that’s providing internet. In other words, it is still not possible to remotely connect to the camera. My F800 Pro connects to my car’s hotspot automatically to obtain internet, and so does my phone. But I am unable to communicate with my camera via the app or any other way all though in the same network. Maybe in the future remote connection would be possible.

Yes, you can, like in one scenario, I have the camera connected to my home wifi and stream from inside – say to check when I hear something outside – that’s why I would like to be able to turn the camera on off on wifi while parking.

You can use software which supports rtsp to stream – like vlc, you can access the camera stream like this. You will need to find the ip of the camera.

rtsp://camera_ip:554/live

On android I use tinycam, where you create a generic camera brand, with rtsp request set to the above url and protocol rtsp over tcp or udp. Actually with tiny cam the delay/lag on streaming is almost acceptable, better than the app.

You can also do bits of automation in tiny cam with tasker, I did to turn rear/front view streaming and switch on/off the wifi/record(led) – the led won’t stay off, I recon it’s state is constantly updated on gps.
 
As far as the latest firmware version, the camera will turn Wifi off in parking mode (presumably to save power) – so it’s not possible to stream and/or connect with the camera remotely.

The only way thinkware could go around that, while keeping power usage down, will be to enable wowlan (wake on wireless lan) trigger – if the hardware is capable. I am not sure if they have any plans on doing that.

The other option will be to connect the acc wire to the battery, which will keep the camera running fully all the time - not the best idea since will be taxing on your battery.

Or, a possible third alternative will be for you to install a remotely controlled relay(rf, wifi, bluetooth) on the acc wire – to wake your camera on demand.


Thank you for the answer!

This is very bad for me, I bought this camera for cloud streaming to my phone via MIFI PORTABLE modem sim card device.

I have cellink pro battery. Would it be possible to keep at non parking if directly connected to that battery and have cloud streaming service via mifi modem?

Maybe I should go directly to blackvue? or have patience because its coming to TW?
 
Thank you for the answer!

This is very bad for me, I bought this camera for cloud streaming to my phone via MIFI PORTABLE modem sim card device.

I have cellink pro battery. Would it be possible to keep at non parking if directly connected to that battery and have cloud streaming service via mifi modem?

Maybe I should go directly to blackvue? or have patience because its coming to TW?

I have the same cellink pro, and on the output from cellink you have 4 wires, 3 for camera and one(green if recall correctly) which goes to the car acc.

I think if of the tree which are meant for the camera, you connect the battery and the acc together (red and yellow not the green one or the ground/black) it should keep your camera on well, at least until the cellink is depleted.

I haven’t tried this yet, I waiting for a low power Bluetooth relay (and an wifi one as well) I ordered, then I will try messing around a little bit and see if I can get this to wakeup remotely, and I will try this as well and I will let you know, just to confirm.

And I do think they are going to release the cloud streaming as well as some point, just not sure when and in fairness I am not sure how practical will it be over mobile data.

Meanwhile things can be done as to allow streaming, from using apps like tiny cam , as a proxy, which can do cloud streaming as well, to using your mifi portable modem with port forwarding on 554 and a dynamic dns for the ip discovery – sorry the technical jargon, I will try different setups, when I get a little bit of time and maybe I make doc for whom interested.
 
I have the same cellink pro, and on the output from cellink you have 4 wires, 3 for camera and one(green if recall correctly) which goes to the car acc.

I think if of the tree which are meant for the camera, you connect the battery and the acc together (red and yellow not the green one or the ground/black) it should keep your camera on well, at least until the cellink is depleted.

I haven’t tried this yet, I waiting for a low power Bluetooth relay (and an wifi one as well) I ordered, then I will try messing around a little bit and see if I can get this to wakeup remotely, and I will try this as well and I will let you know, just to confirm.

And I do think they are going to release the cloud streaming as well as some point, just not sure when and in fairness I am not sure how practical will it be over mobile data.

Meanwhile things can be done as to allow streaming, from using apps like tiny cam , as a proxy, which can do cloud streaming as well, to using your mifi portable modem with port forwarding on 554 and a dynamic dns for the ip discovery – sorry the technical jargon, I will try different setups, when I get a little bit of time and maybe I make doc for whom interested.

Im glad I met someone like you in this forum haha. My fear is. If camera doesnt connect to wifi in parking mode and someone steals the camera or cards then there wont be evidence at all,am I wrong?. Or does it connect to wifi if there is a hit event and uploads a backup save via my mifi in the cloud accessible remotely by phone?
 
Im glad I met someone like you in this forum haha. My fear is. If camera doesnt connect to wifi in parking mode and someone steals the camera or cards then there wont be evidence at all,am I wrong?. Or does it connect to wifi if there is a hit event and uploads a backup save via my mifi in the cloud accessible remotely by phone?

I thought about that as well, so far I got my camera to connect, while in the car, to the android access point, and home, to my wifi. My android will turn off the access point automatically when the car is off and then the camera will try to find the next available option, in order my home wifi or my work wifi.

From this point on, what I would like to do, ideally is, to get the camera to upload all the recordings for the day onto my NAS (network attached storage) – this would be possible if could get the camera to keep the wifi on at least on a timer until the upload process is over, without keeping the car running. Myself, I am not a big fan of the cloud option – and storage nowadays is dirt-cheap – you can get 8TB+ for as little as 200 bucks, it will be faster and I own it.

Your point is also valid as well, in case of theft, ideally the camera would upload the last motion detection or the last event detect as it happens.

However if you are on a data modem, given the size of the videos, 80MB for 2 minutes or 14MB for time-lapse, respectively 20MB for event detection could be a bit of a problem as it could take way too long, especially if you are streaming all the time.

In the live mode (not parking mode), I can easily write a script to monitor the events and/or timelapse folders and upload if there is a new recording. However, in the parking mode I am not quite sure how to do that, yet.
 
Im glad I met someone like you in this forum haha. My fear is. If camera doesnt connect to wifi in parking mode and someone steals the camera or cards then there wont be evidence at all,am I wrong?. Or does it connect to wifi if there is a hit event and uploads a backup save via my mifi in the cloud accessible remotely by phone?


I made a comment on YouTube saying cloud for parking is much more useful than cloud for driving impact. Thinkware replied that they're working on it.
 
I made a comment on YouTube saying cloud for parking is much more useful than cloud for driving impact. Thinkware replied that they're working on it.
So true. Do you think blackvue has cloud parking mode?
 
@Larry Lart... I have the F800 Pro and I've been messing around with Tinycam. Your rtsp method is really easy, thanks!

Any idea how to get a feed for the rear camera, though?
 
Basically to get the camera to switch between front/rear, manual mode, you need to connect to the camera ip, port 7878 (you can do that from a command line with either telnet or putty, on android with something like connectbot ) and send the following sequence of commands:

First: send :{"token":0,"msg_id":257} – to get the token, which is a session like token for the command sequence, you will need to use this for every sub-sequential command in the session. The response will look like: {"rval":0,"msg_id":257,"param":2} – where 2, after the param, is the token you will need to pass in the other commands.

Than you need to send the actual command to switch between front/rear (replace <token> with the token you receive in the first command in this example is 2) :

for rear: {"token":<token>,"param":"preview_rear","msg_id":2049} - in this case will be {"token":2,"param":"preview_rear","msg_id":2049}

and for front : {"token":<token>,"param":"preview_front","msg_id":2049} - in this case will be {"token":2,"param":"preview_front","msg_id":2049}

Tinycam integrates with tasker (android app) - there are four buttons at the bottom, which you can customise for various functions, and there is a plugin in tasker, SendExpect, which can be used/scripted to run/send these commands for you.
I will include the xml export from tasker for the rear/front scripts – you will need to customise these with your camera ip once you import them in tasker.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.
 

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There is some good info here. I've been wanting to know if any current dashcams would be able to connect to the home wifi since I'm tired of removing the cam or the sdcard when I want to pull a file from the device. So, if I'm understanding things correctly, the F800 does have the ability to connect to home wifi and is accessible --- in one or more ways --- to other systems on the network. This is something I've been wanting to know as it's information that's not really covered in the manuals or reviews (need more "nerd" levels ;) ). I've been told that the DS750S is similar in that way and allows for pulling files via the cloud app, but I was hoping for something more, like Larry Lart mentioned with the NAS.

I think I'll have to do more comparisons between the general DS750S and F800 (video quality and such) and get one to experiment with.
 
So, if I'm understanding things correctly, the F800 does have the ability to connect to home wifi and is accessible --- in one or more ways --- to other systems on the network.

Yes, you can get the camera to connect to you home network but unfortunately in that case the thinkware mobile app won’t work(it only works with access point)/ However you can access the camera by other means for streaming, control and file access.

For file access so far there are two ways of access over home wifi:

1. Using the remote cmd and data services with a set of commands similar to the one I described above. Unfortunately this will be a bit more involved and you will need to write an application to connect to the data socket and save the files.

2. run an ftp upload from the camera itself, I tested and seems to work fine something like this:

ftpput -u <ftp_user> -p <ftp_password> <ftp_host> <ftp_remote_folder>/evt_rec/EVT_2017_11_30_18_29_49_F.MP4 /tmp/SD0/evt_rec/EVT_2017_11_30_18_29_49_F.MP4

Replace <ftp_user> <ftp_password> <ftp_host> <ftp_remote_folder> with your user, password, host and remote folder of your ftp server.

I attached a sample script which you can copy on the sd card and run remotely over a telnet session.

I finally got a bit of time today to setup my relay in order to be able to access/wakeup camera from parking, I will post the details in a separate thread, and I plan to setup a series of scripts to backup all data on a NAS over night.
 

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Hi larry lart ha l you for you support and script.
I want ask you a question. The script when e do you put it ? On the sd card ? And how you program the script/ftp for to start the automatic transfer ?
The script you tested with F800 PRO ? Thanks a lot.
 
Thank you for the answer!

This is very bad for me, I bought this camera for cloud streaming to my phone via MIFI PORTABLE modem sim card device.

I have cellink pro battery. Would it be possible to keep at non parking if directly connected to that battery and have cloud streaming service via mifi modem?

Maybe I should go directly to blackvue? or have patience because its coming to TW?

Blackvues cloud is terrible, its way too slow. Trust me, I have a 750. This cloud service crap they offer is not worth it.
 
Yes, you can get the camera to connect to you home network but unfortunately in that case the thinkware mobile app won’t work(it only works with access point)/ However you can access the camera by other means for streaming, control and file access.

For file access so far there are two ways of access over home wifi:

1. Using the remote cmd and data services with a set of commands similar to the one I described above. Unfortunately this will be a bit more involved and you will need to write an application to connect to the data socket and save the files.

2. run an ftp upload from the camera itself, I tested and seems to work fine something like this:

ftpput -u <ftp_user> -p <ftp_password> <ftp_host> <ftp_remote_folder>/evt_rec/EVT_2017_11_30_18_29_49_F.MP4 /tmp/SD0/evt_rec/EVT_2017_11_30_18_29_49_F.MP4

Replace <ftp_user> <ftp_password> <ftp_host> <ftp_remote_folder> with your user, password, host and remote folder of your ftp server.

I attached a sample script which you can copy on the sd card and run remotely over a telnet session.

I finally got a bit of time today to setup my relay in order to be able to access/wakeup camera from parking, I will post the details in a separate thread, and I plan to setup a series of scripts to backup all data on a NAS over night.
Thanks! Can't wait to tinker.
 
Blackvues cloud is terrible, its way too slow. Trust me, I have a 750. This cloud service crap they offer is not worth it.

Given the big size of these video, transferring via the cloud will be slow even more if you take in account a mobile hotspot as opposed to high speed wifi, regardless what cloud solution you use.

I want ask you a question. The script when e do you put it ? On the sd card ? And how you program the script/ftp for to start the automatic transfer ?
The script you tested with F800 PRO ? Thanks a lot.

Yes, the script will have to be on the sd card and yes I only (own) tested the script on f800pro.

As for programming the script to run automatically - that is still work in progress, so far I only initiated the script manually. One option will be to use tasker, again with sendexpect plugin, to schedule the backup.
Another, more elegant solution, will be to get the camera scheduler process to do that when my camera detects/connects to my home wifi. However, while I did manage the get the scheduler service to run, on reboot and on switching between parking mode the process is stopped - so I am still looking for a way to hook this in.
 
Ok thanks a lot for the answer.

Good, you did a great job ;)
 
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