thebravo
New Member
Hi Guys,
A quick intro before I dive into the issues, feel free to skip if you just want to review whats going on with my A139's. I'm thebravo, I'm staff over on rdforum and heavily into electronic countermeasures and of course dashcams. I got into dash cams back in the 2015 era, starting with a fairly basic taotronics 1080P unit. I ran a few separate dashcam's in my last vehicle 2010 Honda Odyssey covering the front rear and inside. Sadly that vehicle met it's end in a very bad collision back in 2020. A speeding vehicle on the other side of the divided multi-lane road lost control came over the median and hit me head on, got hit from behind 0.3 seconds later as I got shoved into an adjacent lane from the initial impact, hit two more times less severely from other vehicles as we were spinning out. My front single channel 2k taotronics dash camera snapped off at the hinge joint on impact and was ejected from the vehicle. The rear one also snapped of at the joint on impact but wasn't recording at the time due to a bad SD card. My overhead interior entry level blackvue 2 channel system stayed in place and captured the interior of the vehicle during the accident and continued to record through the extrication process. The footage of the accident was very helpful in the legal proceedings afterwards We replaced that Odyssey with a newer Honda Odyssey and I set out to get dashcams installed promptly. I grabbed the A129plus and a vantrue N2pro on a black friday deal, the A129 plus covered front and rear, the Vantrue was placed overhead where my blackvue used to be and the blackvue which had survived the crash was setup for left and right facing. I decided low profile adhesive mounts were the way to go as all the other style mounts failed during the crash. I signed up to be a Viofo Reviewer, and I got an email from them a couple months later asking if I would indeed review for them. The first camera they sent me to review was an A139. I coincidentally won a second A139 in a raffle, which replaced a not great dashcam install in my wifes car.
So now to the Issue, the camera in my car which is a couple months older than the one in my wifes car worked perfectly for the first year or so, but finally had it's first issue and it's an odd but serious one. I went to pull footage for a few interesting events that happened on a trip, I decided to download them via wifi. I started the car and it did the usual start up voice announcement (recording three channels started) and I connected via wifi, I went into the recordings folder, but everything in there was old... like a month old. I so I pulled the card and put it in my computer and yep, the last recording on the card was about a month ago. The camera had been starting up and announcing it was recording/ and going into parking mode with the parking mode announcement, buttons worked lights were all on, but nothing was being written to the card for a month. Yikes. luckily when I put the A139 in my car I didn't feel like unwiring the A129 plus, (I did disable parking mode) but it was still running when I was driving so the A129 had the footage I needed. I did note that the last recording the A139 captured before taking a month off, was a parking mode recording. It was the most recent dated file on the card, it had been in parking mode for a while as there were a bunch of parking mode recordings from the same date. Likely the last file was when the camera shutdown at the low voltage cutoff set on the hardwire, oddly though the last file was corrupt and unreadable in any video players including VLC. I formatted the card, the camera started recording normally and actually writing data to the card. It was a couple months later and I went to pull some footage and to my dismay it had failed again in the same manner. It had not been recording for about 3 weeks, but it appeared to be working and was consistently announcing that it was recording. I replaced the SD card with a new one this time.
A little over a month later I started having a random dead battery in my car, I might not drive the car for a 3-4 days and it would be fine, but then other times it would be dead overnight less than 12 hours since I last drove the car. And by dead I mean less than 10 volts. It was very random, might have a dead battery once in 2 weeks or might have it be dead a couple days in a row. I had the battery and charging system checked and everything tested fine. I Had another recording failure during this time, where the camera appeared to be working but nothing was being written to the card. I pulled the card and again the last recording was parking mode, and it was corrupt/unreadable. I dug in on my intermittent dead battery issue, and to do parasitic draw tests I disconnected the A139. I started unplugging the USB from the A139 every time I parked for anything over an hour or so, and the dead battery issue stopped happening. So I started leaving it plugged in and the dead battery thing began to happen again, though still intermittent. My Viofo rep said it's possible the issues are related, and since my wifes A139 had been flawless he suggested we swap the main units between cars and see if the issue moved with the camera or stayed with the car. I didn't get to do things right away as life intervened.
Before I was able to do the work required to do this swapping around of cameras and installing a spare camera as backup in her car I went back to unplugging my camera every time I parked to avoid dead batteries. I noticed something, every time I would unplug it the last driving clip would be corrupt/unreadable. In the mean time my wife came home and asked me to pull footage from her A139 as there had been a motorcycle wreck behind and next to her on her commute. I was going to wifi download it and started her car, her A139 announced three channel recording started, I enabled wifi and discovered the last thing showing in the app was nearly a month old... I pulled the card and yep it had experienced the exact same issue as the A139 in my car, only there was no redundant backup in her car so I had no footage of the initial car vs motorcycle impact. I checked further on her card and wouldn't you know, the last recording was in parking mode after being in parking mode a while and yep, it's corrupt/unreadable. I installed the A129 plus immediately in her car and I put a new card in her A139 but didn't swap the A139's yet, wanted to make sure everything was good with the A129 plus for a couple weeks. I drove her car this past weekend and I didn't get the usual voice announcement from her A139. I looked up and no lights on it, no response to buttons, it is slightly warm to touch but thats it. I tried it in the house on a wall charger with a usb C cable and nothing, reset button didn't help. It's dead, it does get warm to touch after a while of being plugged in suggesting it's consuming voltage but it's not able to actually start. I decided to pull the card and see what the last thing it recorded was, you should be able to guess what it was by now. Parking mode, last clip unreadable/corrupt.
On both of the A139's something has happened over the now approaching 2 years I have had them and they both have experienced the same fault. If I'm correct these cameras have a capacitor/battery (likely a capacitor) to provide a short bit of power to the camera once external power is lost so that the camera can finish writing the video file and shutdown cleanly. My A129plus and all my other cameras do this , they stay alive for an additional couple seconds after power loss before shutting down to finish writing the files. I believe my A139's used to do this, though as I had them wired for parking mode they rarely shut down when I was in the car. I don't recall having corrupt parking mode files at the low voltage cutoff during the first year. It would seem that at least sometimes when the camera abruptly shuts down it causes corruption on the card that prevents the camera from writing new data successfully. The camera doesn't detect this failure and continues to announce correct operation when in fact isn't not writing any footage to the card. I'm suspecting that capacitor/battery has failed in both of my A139's, it would explain the file corruption on power loss and might explain why my wifes isn't powering up (bad capacitors are known to cause this in a host of electronic devices). I think additionally I have a failing hardwire in my car thats is intermittently failing to shut the unit down and is draining the battery. I do live in FL, so it is hot down here, and while I have never had the cameras shut down on overtemp, they are in a hot car a lot which isn't great for batteries / capacitors in the long run. I have both units mounted such that they are in the shade during the hottest part of the day, I have the windows cracked open and sunshades in the windshield to keep it from getting extremely hot in the cars but it's still hot in there.
I haven't heard back from my contact at Viofo yet, though he's not technically a support person. I will reach out to Viofo support, with these being more than a year old I don't know that they will help me but maybe. If they don't end up taking them back I will probably open them up and see if I can find the fault, if it's a bad cap, I might even be able to replace it as I have some experience with replacing failed capacitors in power supplies...
I have really liked the A139 otherwise, they were very solid the first year, I love having the internal footage as I can say internal footage helped in the last accident. I hope there is a resolution for this, cause there aren't a lot of options in the 3 channel lineup that I check all the boxes that the A139 does but dropping $400+ dollars to replace them with two more A139's that may also die after a little over a year is not something I'm wanting to do.
A quick intro before I dive into the issues, feel free to skip if you just want to review whats going on with my A139's. I'm thebravo, I'm staff over on rdforum and heavily into electronic countermeasures and of course dashcams. I got into dash cams back in the 2015 era, starting with a fairly basic taotronics 1080P unit. I ran a few separate dashcam's in my last vehicle 2010 Honda Odyssey covering the front rear and inside. Sadly that vehicle met it's end in a very bad collision back in 2020. A speeding vehicle on the other side of the divided multi-lane road lost control came over the median and hit me head on, got hit from behind 0.3 seconds later as I got shoved into an adjacent lane from the initial impact, hit two more times less severely from other vehicles as we were spinning out. My front single channel 2k taotronics dash camera snapped off at the hinge joint on impact and was ejected from the vehicle. The rear one also snapped of at the joint on impact but wasn't recording at the time due to a bad SD card. My overhead interior entry level blackvue 2 channel system stayed in place and captured the interior of the vehicle during the accident and continued to record through the extrication process. The footage of the accident was very helpful in the legal proceedings afterwards We replaced that Odyssey with a newer Honda Odyssey and I set out to get dashcams installed promptly. I grabbed the A129plus and a vantrue N2pro on a black friday deal, the A129 plus covered front and rear, the Vantrue was placed overhead where my blackvue used to be and the blackvue which had survived the crash was setup for left and right facing. I decided low profile adhesive mounts were the way to go as all the other style mounts failed during the crash. I signed up to be a Viofo Reviewer, and I got an email from them a couple months later asking if I would indeed review for them. The first camera they sent me to review was an A139. I coincidentally won a second A139 in a raffle, which replaced a not great dashcam install in my wifes car.
So now to the Issue, the camera in my car which is a couple months older than the one in my wifes car worked perfectly for the first year or so, but finally had it's first issue and it's an odd but serious one. I went to pull footage for a few interesting events that happened on a trip, I decided to download them via wifi. I started the car and it did the usual start up voice announcement (recording three channels started) and I connected via wifi, I went into the recordings folder, but everything in there was old... like a month old. I so I pulled the card and put it in my computer and yep, the last recording on the card was about a month ago. The camera had been starting up and announcing it was recording/ and going into parking mode with the parking mode announcement, buttons worked lights were all on, but nothing was being written to the card for a month. Yikes. luckily when I put the A139 in my car I didn't feel like unwiring the A129 plus, (I did disable parking mode) but it was still running when I was driving so the A129 had the footage I needed. I did note that the last recording the A139 captured before taking a month off, was a parking mode recording. It was the most recent dated file on the card, it had been in parking mode for a while as there were a bunch of parking mode recordings from the same date. Likely the last file was when the camera shutdown at the low voltage cutoff set on the hardwire, oddly though the last file was corrupt and unreadable in any video players including VLC. I formatted the card, the camera started recording normally and actually writing data to the card. It was a couple months later and I went to pull some footage and to my dismay it had failed again in the same manner. It had not been recording for about 3 weeks, but it appeared to be working and was consistently announcing that it was recording. I replaced the SD card with a new one this time.
A little over a month later I started having a random dead battery in my car, I might not drive the car for a 3-4 days and it would be fine, but then other times it would be dead overnight less than 12 hours since I last drove the car. And by dead I mean less than 10 volts. It was very random, might have a dead battery once in 2 weeks or might have it be dead a couple days in a row. I had the battery and charging system checked and everything tested fine. I Had another recording failure during this time, where the camera appeared to be working but nothing was being written to the card. I pulled the card and again the last recording was parking mode, and it was corrupt/unreadable. I dug in on my intermittent dead battery issue, and to do parasitic draw tests I disconnected the A139. I started unplugging the USB from the A139 every time I parked for anything over an hour or so, and the dead battery issue stopped happening. So I started leaving it plugged in and the dead battery thing began to happen again, though still intermittent. My Viofo rep said it's possible the issues are related, and since my wifes A139 had been flawless he suggested we swap the main units between cars and see if the issue moved with the camera or stayed with the car. I didn't get to do things right away as life intervened.
Before I was able to do the work required to do this swapping around of cameras and installing a spare camera as backup in her car I went back to unplugging my camera every time I parked to avoid dead batteries. I noticed something, every time I would unplug it the last driving clip would be corrupt/unreadable. In the mean time my wife came home and asked me to pull footage from her A139 as there had been a motorcycle wreck behind and next to her on her commute. I was going to wifi download it and started her car, her A139 announced three channel recording started, I enabled wifi and discovered the last thing showing in the app was nearly a month old... I pulled the card and yep it had experienced the exact same issue as the A139 in my car, only there was no redundant backup in her car so I had no footage of the initial car vs motorcycle impact. I checked further on her card and wouldn't you know, the last recording was in parking mode after being in parking mode a while and yep, it's corrupt/unreadable. I installed the A129 plus immediately in her car and I put a new card in her A139 but didn't swap the A139's yet, wanted to make sure everything was good with the A129 plus for a couple weeks. I drove her car this past weekend and I didn't get the usual voice announcement from her A139. I looked up and no lights on it, no response to buttons, it is slightly warm to touch but thats it. I tried it in the house on a wall charger with a usb C cable and nothing, reset button didn't help. It's dead, it does get warm to touch after a while of being plugged in suggesting it's consuming voltage but it's not able to actually start. I decided to pull the card and see what the last thing it recorded was, you should be able to guess what it was by now. Parking mode, last clip unreadable/corrupt.
On both of the A139's something has happened over the now approaching 2 years I have had them and they both have experienced the same fault. If I'm correct these cameras have a capacitor/battery (likely a capacitor) to provide a short bit of power to the camera once external power is lost so that the camera can finish writing the video file and shutdown cleanly. My A129plus and all my other cameras do this , they stay alive for an additional couple seconds after power loss before shutting down to finish writing the files. I believe my A139's used to do this, though as I had them wired for parking mode they rarely shut down when I was in the car. I don't recall having corrupt parking mode files at the low voltage cutoff during the first year. It would seem that at least sometimes when the camera abruptly shuts down it causes corruption on the card that prevents the camera from writing new data successfully. The camera doesn't detect this failure and continues to announce correct operation when in fact isn't not writing any footage to the card. I'm suspecting that capacitor/battery has failed in both of my A139's, it would explain the file corruption on power loss and might explain why my wifes isn't powering up (bad capacitors are known to cause this in a host of electronic devices). I think additionally I have a failing hardwire in my car thats is intermittently failing to shut the unit down and is draining the battery. I do live in FL, so it is hot down here, and while I have never had the cameras shut down on overtemp, they are in a hot car a lot which isn't great for batteries / capacitors in the long run. I have both units mounted such that they are in the shade during the hottest part of the day, I have the windows cracked open and sunshades in the windshield to keep it from getting extremely hot in the cars but it's still hot in there.
I haven't heard back from my contact at Viofo yet, though he's not technically a support person. I will reach out to Viofo support, with these being more than a year old I don't know that they will help me but maybe. If they don't end up taking them back I will probably open them up and see if I can find the fault, if it's a bad cap, I might even be able to replace it as I have some experience with replacing failed capacitors in power supplies...
I have really liked the A139 otherwise, they were very solid the first year, I love having the internal footage as I can say internal footage helped in the last accident. I hope there is a resolution for this, cause there aren't a lot of options in the 3 channel lineup that I check all the boxes that the A139 does but dropping $400+ dollars to replace them with two more A139's that may also die after a little over a year is not something I'm wanting to do.