new user; hi!

artag

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I just bought a new/used car with fairly poor reaar visibility (Citroen berlingo) and no factory-fitted camera. So I bought a mirror cam - I'd already got a 3rd party satnav and didnt want another screen on the dash. It's a DuDuBell MD2 full-screen with front and rear 1080p cameras. £30 secondhand on ebay, so no big loss if I learn from it and want a better one.
I'm in the UK.

There is plenty of old information about DuDubell on the net but it mostly seems to be the earlier mirror cams with an inset 4.3" screen rather than the 10" fullscreen. However I can find very little about DuDuBell's current products. Maybe they've gone bust ? Not sure how common the firmware is on these dashcams - usual chinese practice is that they're all clones of each other with a few label changes. Will I find information about my dashcam under another name ?

Ideally, I want to use it for reversing and as a rear-view mirror. It has dashcam functions but that's not important to me - Smart mirror is the main application. It's just about acceptable in this manner. The main problem is that the exposure in the rear mirror is incorrect. I can perhaps improve it by pointing down : the problem is that the camera is adjusting its exposure for the sky and so it underexposes the road clutter, even though that part of the picture isn't visible on the screen.

I'm interested in hacking the screen firmware but actually, although that has a few annoyances, it's the camera where it wants to be clever. I'm thinking of replacing the original with a home made one consisting of a raspberry pi zero with ts own camera and composite video out to the dash screen.

I think the camera should :

Calculate exposure based only on the active image area, not the whole HD area.
(this might be possible based on point the camera low, or by putting a graduated filter on the lens to cut the sky brightness)
Ignore headlights and streetlights : get a good image of the real road and clip out the overexposed headlights
Try to remove the lens artifacts from headlights. Not sure how easy that will be.
Provide a view optimised for reversing when reversing and optimised for rearview when not reversing
(this could also be obtained by switching between 2 cameras based on the reverse light signal)

I'm interested to know if there are better ways to achieve this, or if others have experience of these issues.
 
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