Original A118 (non-C) acting strange

Gibson99

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so I recently flashed the latest A118C firmware onto my original (battery) A118, since it's been stated more than once that the capacitor firmware will work just fine on the battery A118. And indeed it worked fine for about a week or so... then one day i was backing into a parking spot (my A118 is being used as a rear cam) and i noticed that the REC light was off, and the screen was frozen - in fact it showed the bushes that i was parked against at the beginning of the drive.

so i did a little troubleshooting. it seems the camera locks up within 1-2 seconds of booting up, but ONLY if it has an SD card inserted. I get the normal startup sound and viofo logo, then it shows live video for a split second, then freezes. there are NO GUI elements (record icon, time, etc) - JUST the frozen video. The card i'm using is a 64gb sandisk high endurance card, which passed testing in h2testw, and was actually the card i used to flash the firmware. all videos that i checked up to the point where the camera started crashing are fine - no corruption. and it even captured me backing into the parking spot at the end of the previous drive, and everything leading up to that, so it was working up till power was cut.

if i boot without an SD, it looks normal, and even complains that there's no SD card, just like you'd expect. power off, put the old sd card back in and boot up, and it locks up again.

so here's the weird part. i tried a different card(16gb lexar class 10), and it booted, but it complained about wrong cluster size or something like that (i had just formatted it in the pc with win10 and "default cluster size"). so i put that card back in the PC, formatted as fat32 w/ 32k cluster size, and the camera booted up and started recording like normal.

now for the REALLY weird part - put the old sandisk high endurance card back in, and it starts recording again like nothing ever happened! no, i didn't format that card. it still has about 325mb free space, as is normal for recycling video. if it matters, i've had it set to 1 minute loops forever. and since i had also flashed my a119 cameras at the same time, i reset defaults on the a118 cameras after the upgrade as well, for good measure.

is my camera finally dying of old age, or something else going on?
 
did you flash the 118c firmware just because you can, or was the battery starting to get tired?
 
as far as i can tell, the battery still seems ok - it wasn't complaining of low batt when i unplugged power or turned off the car (it's not hard-wired, just using a factory 12v plug in the cargo area). i knew there had been some improvements, and i think it was still on the original firmware. I couldn't find a non-C firmware file to flash, so i just used the C firmware.

i have not opened it to see whether the battery is puffed, but since it's not showing any signs....

oh yeah, i almost forgot - when i took it out of the car after i noticed the problem, it turned itself on while on my way into the house. no buttons were being pressed, it just turned on, the screen flickered, and it turned itself back off. it did this about 5-6 times. the last 1-2 times it turned itself on, the screen sort of faded away instead of a clean "turn off", which made me think low battery - but that would be expected since it's not really meant to run from its battery for more than a few seconds anyway. that said, even after these random power-ups, the time/date and all settings were still correct, so it never ran the battery completely dead. that is, assuming the battery a118 uses its lipo for time/date and not an RTC battery.
 
yes no RTC on those, just uses the lipo battery to save settings

there are probably still some other hardware differences between them that could be an issue, I think I'd be inclined to use a battery firmware and see how it goes
 
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