rapid beeping after parked

[Gibson99]

a119 v1 w/ gps, powered thru gps mount, wired for parking mode via battery drain prevention device

just went to the store and cam was working normally - i even captured a county sheriff right in front of me failing to pull over someone who blatantly ran a red light right in front of us. got to the store, parked, was inside less than 15 minutes. came back out, and as i was loading stuff into the back of the car (car not started yet) i could hear the camera up front going "beep beep (pause) beep beep (pause)" over and over. once i finished loading the car and got into the driver seat, i could see that the REC button was flashing red very quickly. i tapped the power button to make the screen turn on, and there was no flashing red dot - so it was as if someone pressed REC to stop it recording.

the files leading up to that moment look normal. i can easily see where i parked (50 seconds into file #064), then about 70 more seconds (i am using 1 minute loop) and then a P file that's only 2.4MB and less than one second long. it plays this short file, but nothing happens in the video - it's just more of the parking lot. the next file starts after i got in and pressed REC to make it start recording again, and it recorded the drive home just fine. There were plenty of cars moving in the parking lot, so there should have been more P files with actual movement in them, but there are none.



card is a samsung evo+ (orange) 128GB that was formatted in the camera. Been using it since mid-december. my battery protector is set to turn off after 6 hours or 12.2v so it's not running constantly. Once I finish copying all the files I want to keep off it, i will start running h2testw on it, but I don't expect to find any issues - all files I've tried to play so far play just fine.

strange thing is that apparently this same thing happened to my wife a couple days ago on her a119 (which is a pre-production sample - no gps, and same 128gb card). she didn't know what to do, so she just unplugged it to make it stop beeping. when i got in her car later that day i noticed it was unplugged. plugged it back in and it started and seemed to work normally. I haven't had a chance to check her memory card yet.

firmware on both is A119_180122_v3.6 which i flashed back in march if i remember right, and yes, i reset defaults and formatted the cards after flashing firmware.

anyone else had this happen?

 

[Nigel]

When you run h2testw, leave the card in the camera and note the read/write speeds...
You might want to give up after a few GB and swap to a fast card reader!
Is it a U1 or U3 Evo+? The U3 version can be a bit slow when not using the UHS bus...

 

[jokiin]

That will demonstrate how poor cameras are at being card readers

 

[borik]

There were plenty of cars moving in the parking lot, so there should have been more P files with actual movement in them, but there are none.

do you have "Motion Detect" enabled or disabled?

 

[Gibson99]

When you run h2testw, leave the card in the camera and note the read/write speeds...
You might want to give up after a few GB and swap to a fast card reader!
Is it a U1 or U3 Evo+? The U3 version can be a bit slow when not using the UHS bus...

sorry, it's not an evo+ it's just a plain orange and white evo, but it does have the U3 marking. I have a red/white evo+ 64gb card that i mostly use in my git2 - it's only U1.

here are the results from an external USB 2.0 card reader - seems plenty fast to me:


Not much point in testing it in the camera. like jokiin said, it would just be painful slow.

do you have "Motion Detect" enabled or disabled?

off, because parking mode is enabled - 5fps.

because of the other bug where it sometimes thinks it's still in parking mode and triggers/locks files even with my G-sensor set to OFF, i'm thinking about disabling parking mode and just turning on motion detect. not ideal, but better than a bunch of nuisance files in the RO folder, and annoying beeps while i'm driving.

 

[Nigel]

Not much point in testing it in the camera. like jokiin said, it would just be painful slow.

It may be fast enough in your card reader, but that doesn't mean it is fast enough in the camera, they are probably talking to the card in different ways since the camera will not use the high speed data bus (UHS). Yes it will be a slow test, but just testing 1GB with h2testw will tell us if the camera is able to write to the card fast enough, those U3 Evo cards can be marginal when using the original slow SD card data bus, depending on what bitrate you are using.

 

[Gibson99]

ok, so here's what it shows so far. there are 2 main differences between this and the last test - obviously it's in the camera instead of my card reader, and this time it's fat32, formatted in the camera. with the previous test, it was exfat, formatted in the pc/card reader (just a quick format to erase everything).



it started out at 7.5MB/sec but slowly worked its way down to about 5.4 and seems to have leveled off there. a bit slow, but passable, since it works out to over 40mbps. that should be plenty even for 1440p, which is where it's set.

edit: and none of the videos I checked, which ranged from early march (stuff in RO) to last night, were corrupt. Also checked a few random regular videos, and they were fine too. no skipping, dropped frames, or other corruption. audio was nice and clear too.

 

[Nigel]

Although that is fast enough on average, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the cause of the beeping with the camera detecting it as being slow.

That is class 4 card speed and class 4 cards are known to be too slow for some current cameras!

 

[Gibson99]

yes, that definitely makes sense. wonder if the card(s) are already wearing out, since it's been working fine for several months already. it's especially strange that both would show the same symptoms within a day or two of each other, especially since my wife's car is driven at least 3x as much as mine because it's nicer and gets better mileage. both cars have an A119 in front with the same samsung evo 128gb card in each. only real difference between our cameras is that hers doesn't have GPS as it's a pre-production unit that doesn't have the contacts on the back. mine is a first-run production v1 unit with the gps mount. i've considered ordering a v2 upgrade kit for hers, but i don't know whether the connector exists on the board for the contacts on the back. it may not, though i'm not afraid of using a soldering iron. i'll start a separate thread on that though. edit: found a video of someone installing his v2 upgrade kit. looks like the connector DOES exist on mine, so i should be able to upgrade it if i want.

 

[Nigel]

yes, that definitely makes sense. wonder if the card(s) are already wearing out, since it's been working fine for several months already. it's especially strange that both would show the same symptoms within a day or two of each other, especially since my wife's car is driven at least 3x as much as mine because it's nicer and gets better mileage. both cars have an A119 in front with the same samsung evo 128gb card in each. only real difference between our cameras is that hers doesn't have GPS as it's a pre-production unit that doesn't have the contacts on the back. mine is a first-run production v1 unit with the gps mount. i've considered ordering a v2 upgrade kit for hers, but i don't know whether the connector exists on the board for the contacts on the back. it may not, though i'm not afraid of using a soldering iron. i'll start a separate thread on that though. edit: found a video of someone installing his v2 upgrade kit. looks like the connector DOES exist on mine, so i should be able to upgrade it if i want.

Don't expect they are wearing out, takes a long time for a big card to wear out. Maybe it is the summer temperature slowing it down? Have you upgraded firmware or something recently that may have affected them?

In the days of class 4/6/etc there was a requirement that the card always keep up, but since UHS the cards only have to achieve an average speed and the device is supposed to provide a buffer. I suspect the newer Evo cards are not truly class 6 compatible but the older cameras need them to be so. I've had a problem with my U3 Evo in two cameras, it's currently in my Viofo A129 which uses a newer processor with better SD bus support and there it has worked perfectly. Never had any issue with the slower U1 Evos being fast enough.

You could try a lower bitrate, but probably the camera will buffer up the same size segment of file and then write it with the same issue.

I don't have any experience of the A119 so can't help you with the upgrading.