Thinkware F770 stuck in a reboot loop ("rear camera detected, system restarting")

Jamey

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Hi everyone.

Two days ago I had a Thinkware F770 (2ch - front and rear) system installed into my car by Chameleon Direct here in the UK. The install was nice and clean and everything worked perfectly for the rest of that day while I was playing around with it and testing it, I was very happy with the quality and performance of it.

Yesterday it began to constantly restart itself while the engine is running. It boots up, then says "rear camera detected, system restarting" and you get the musical chime to indicate it's rebooting itself, and that continues forever.

I tried disconnecting the cable for the rear camera and that works - the front unit works fine when it's solo. And also if I let the front camera boot up with the rear cable disconnected and then plug the rear in after the front has booted it sometimes seems to work. I've had a couple of times when it's stayed on without going into the reboot loop, but it only stays like that until the next time the engine is turned off, then it goes back to constantly restarting when the engine comes back on.

It's on the latest firmware. When the cable is disconnected I can connect to the front unit via my iPhone fine, but when the cable is conencted and it's in the reboot loop I can't connect via phone or turn wifi on. I've checked the the cable for the rear unit is properly connected at both ends, there doesn't seem to be anything loose.

I've called Chameleon to make them aware and am waiting for them to call me back so obviously that's my first course of action, but I thought I'd post here because I Googled this issue and found this thread ( https://dashcamtalk.com/forum/threads/thinkware-f750-with-rearview-camera-help.20769/ ) from August 2016 with the same issue, albeit on an F750. Have posted there too but thought it was worth starting a thread in the F770 forum as well.

As I said, the system worked fine for about 24 hours after the install and during that time nothing was touched - no cables were moved at all, no memory card was changed, nothing was updated and no settings were changed, so I'm not sure what's happened.

Any help anyone can offer would be appreciated. Thanks for reading.
 
Hi, i do the technical for Chameleon and my hunch is the rear camera has gone faulty. I will make sure this gets sorted for you ASAP and we will contact you to arrange an engineer visit to check it over. Apologies for the problems.....
 
Thank you Steve. I'll PM you a couple of details now (reg number etc) so you can find my records at your end. Appreciate the quick response.
 
Voicemail left for you :)
 
@Maddog1974 just to let you know, I had a reply from the PM I sent to the user who had the same problem as me in the thread I linked above, and he's said that in the end his problem was the 'video in' port on the main (front) unit of his F750, as opposed to the rear camera unit. So we should probably have replacements of both units available for the engineer to test with, what do you think?
 
We will be sending a full front & rear kit out so the engineer will have any required parts there :)
 
Beautiful, thanks very much. Really appreciate it.
 
Wicked glad to hear that Jamey :). All the best, you know where i am if needed in the future!
 
Hi Friends,

I am facing the same problem. Camera keeps reloading with the same message. Though it never worked for me. It kept on reloading since i connected the rear cam first time. Any other solution? Firmware was already updated.

I have raised a concern with ebay seller.
 
Hi Aussie,

As mentioned above, for me this was a faulty rear camera unit - when we replaced the rear camera everything started working again and has been working fine since (touch wood, etc).

I'm afraid there wasn't anything else that worked for me, so it sounds like you might have to return the unit for a replacement.
 
I faced the problem last week on a BMW M - Day - and that was the only day I really needed it, and it failed me. As soon as I got home it started working again... The only difference was it was a much colder day.
 
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