Which parking mode selection is less taxing on camera?

sandiskman

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I left my cameras plugged in all night last night by mistake. I usually unplug them at night when I park the car. In any case having the cameras plugged in all night did not affect the car's battery at all. Both cams have parking mode enabled. The front cam is set to event detection. The rear cam is set to 1FPS.

After leaving both cams plugged in from 8am-9am (the following day) they were both very warm to the touch. The front cam with even detection on did not record anything from the time I parked the car in the garage at 10pm until I went out to the car in the morning at 8am, but it was still very warm.

This got me thinking...which mode is less taxing on the camera? The event detection (camera only records when there is motion) or the slower FPS (camera always recording just at 1FPS vs. 60FPS)??? Opinions?
 
Don't have any technical details on these dash cam such as schematics and source code so it would be hard to tell how hard they are working. You can try using a USB power monitor to see how much power/current the camera is using at the various modes. Less current would mean the camera is not working as hard.
 
Another less scientific method, one of the laser temp guns. The warmer the camera the harder it's working. Hard to use this method without a controlled environment though.
 
As a side question; how did you set the rear cam to record time lapse and front motion detection? I have parking mode on and the auto event detection selected
 
In all modes the sensor is ON and the processor is doing something with the video stream, whether that be detecting motion or encoding a video file on the card. I doubt there's much difference between them, although I have not tested the actual power consumption in each mode.

Higher bitrates tend to increase the camera temperature, so low bitrate or time lapse parking modes should run cooler than 1080p30 or 1080p60 recording. A camera recording all day while parked in direct sunlight will certainly get very hot, so anything you can do to keep the temperature down will be good for your camera.
 
Are those high? I started using low bit rate since auto event seemed kinda unreliable
 
View attachment 44106

Here are the measurements I got. I used two multimeters, one to read voltage and the other wired in series to get amperage.
Hi Andrew!
Very nice review on the A129! However, in the table you specified that Low Bitrate is called "Auto Event Detection" which is in fact called "Low bitrate recording" and is recording all the time, not 60 seconds :)
 
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