SGZC12RC stopped recording for some reason.

[titan_rw]

Hi all.

I bought a SGZC12RC about 3 months ago. I bought it along with the PANOBDP. I connected GND, BAT, and ACC. I disabled the timer on the BDP, and set the voltage cutoff quite low (don't remember what now). I've enabled motion detection on the Cam so that it will record while parked, if there's motion.

I'm currently keeping dashcam footage on my nas incase it's needed for later, eg red light cameras, etc. Every day I use the car I swap memory cards by pulling the power plug to let the cam properly power down with it's supercap. Then I pull the old card, and insert a fresh one. Plugging the cam back it gets it to power up and go into motion detect mode again.

Today when I went to swap cards, before I got to pulling the power for clean shutdown, I noticed the blue light wasn't flashing. At first I thought the BDP had somehow failed. I hadn't even shut off the car at this point yet. I pulled the power anyway, and waited a few seconds incase it was actually still powered up. (The blue light wasn't on, or flashing) Changed cards, and plugged power back in. This booted the cam back up, and it went back into normal operation. To me this indicated that the BDP was working properly, and that it simply needed a power cycle to start back up.

I got the card back to my computer to see what was on it, and if it had actually recorded anything since the card change yesterday. There is video from 5:30pm yesterday (card change), until 10:30am today. I park at work at about 7:30 am. There's a motion activated video "20160408_102755.MP4" that's 55 seconds long. So it stopped recording at 10:28:50. The next file is "20160408_102934.MP4", but it's ZERO bytes. Nothing was recorded after this, including my 30 minute drive home from work at 5pm. The card was nowhere near full, as it's a 64GB card, and had only 19GB of video on it.

I doubt the card is worn out already, as I have 5 of them, and each day results in about a 1/2 full card. So each card sees half a write per week. Over 3 months (12 weeks), each card has only had about 6 'drive writes' to steal a term from ssd's.

This is kind of concerning, as if I had not been swapping cards regularly and noticed the cam wasn't recording, I could have driven a long time without any video. The cam is located in the glovebox, so it's not readily visible. However, even if it was visible to the driver, they might not notice right away that the blue led isn't flashing.

Is there anything I can do to mitigate the risks of this happening again?

 

[jokiin]

what cards are you using?

 

[niko]

try to format cards time to time inside dascham, especially after you have used it in your PC / laptop /Mac.

 

[titan_rw]

what cards are you using?

They're Adata UHS-1 64GB microsd.

try to format cards time to time inside dascham, especially after you have used it in your PC / laptop /Mac.

I have to plug them into my computer to copy all the video off. So should they be formatted every time then? Is plugging them into a computer poisonous to the operation of the dashcam?

I'm starting to think dashcam's are going to need dual memory card slots for redundancy at some point. Maybe that's now.

 

[jokiin]

They're Adata UHS-1 64GB microsd.

not a model I'm familiar with

I have to plug them into my computer to copy all the video off. So should they be formatted every time then? Is plugging them into a computer poisonous to the operation of the dashcam?
.

best practice, it's not going to hurt the cards at all

 

[niko]

They're Adata UHS-1 64GB microsd.




I have to plug them into my computer to copy all the video off. So should they be formatted every time then? Is plugging them into a computer poisonous to the operation of the dashcam?

I'm starting to think dashcam's are going to need dual memory card slots for redundancy at some point. Maybe that's now.

I dont think you need to format every time, but in many cases it may depend on memory card specifics ( hardware ). Some cards ( mostly cheap ones ) are fussy to "jumping from one environment to another", but yeah - best practice is to format each time after you have used it in your PC.

 

[titan_rw]

It did it the second time already.

I got back from running some errands today at 2:30pm. I changed the memory card as usual, but this time formatted the new one once the cam booted up.

I went to check on it just now (midnight), and the blue light was off. Pulled the power, removed card, insert new card, plugged power. Cam booted up. Formatted card.

Took the 2:30pm - midnight card back inside. It had 37 files on it, but the last one was "20160409_163822.MP4" and again zero bytes. It recorded 4 hours of parking motion, and then quit.

I'm really going to have to monitor this closely. Something you shouldn't have to do with a dashcam.

From what I remember, there aren't too many remote camera dashcams out there. Does anybody know of any other good ones?

EDIT: This is even worse. I just checked the 37 files between 2:30 and recording stop at 4:38. 7 of them are corrupt. No media player I have can play them. Not only does it completely stop recording, but around 20% of the files don't play.

 

[jokiin]

Do you have any other brand of cards there you can test with, if it's tripping up on a card that has plenty of free space then the card is the more likely cause

 

[titan_rw]

Do you have any other brand of cards there you can test with, if it's tripping up on a card that has plenty of free space then the card is the more likely cause

I doubt two different cards would happen to go bad at exactly the same time.

However I do have another microsd I can use that's a totally different brand, but it's at work. I'll grab it on Monday.

In the mean time, I have the 3rd (of 5) card in there now. I'll see how it does tomorrow, as I'm going out of town.

 

[jokiin]

I've never tested that brand to know how they perform, trying a different brand card is a good idea though