Xiaomi Action Cam...

[GJHS]

I charged my 16 hours ago and it says 89% now according to the app, so there is some parasitic drain. Yours seems more severe than normal.

@reverend If it is Sunny at least we have a voice to connect to her posts.

 

[GearBest]

Yes, that's my fabulous nails

 

[M1CHA3L]

Is it possible to auto record when the camera is connected to the power? i want to install it as dashcam

 

[reverend]

To be honest I wouldn't really recommend this as a dashcam right now for multiple reasons - like @GJHS mentions it doesn't currently have a flip mode so if you're using a windscreen mount odds are it would be upside down so you've got to flip it manually each time to view it - some viewers such as VLC can do this which makes life easier.

These are action cameras which may work as a short stint as a dashcam but longer term you'd be better off buying a proper dashcam.

As the firmware evolves you may find it becomes suitable, but having a bright green (admittedly white is coming out soon) camera in your windscreen with lights flashing away (which can actually be turned off in the app) may not be the best thing. As things stand it doesn't auto record or power on so you'd need to do that manually every time with the car.

This is using the sports version of the Ambarella chipset too - exactly how it differs and would cope with heat in a windscreen is something that would need to be tested long term.

 

[reverend]

There's a quick and dirty sample with it sat on my dashboard but this isn't really fair output - I'll try it on the windscreen when I can mount it later:

AE is off because of where it's sat and the vibrations don't help picture quality.

 

[reverend]

There's a handheld test here from within the car - again not a great test but an interesting point of view nevertheless.

 

[reverend]

I've dug out my Mobius mount so I'll see if it's strong enough to hold this camera for long - really not sure as the Mobius is 38g (found that via a quick Google so may be incorrect depending on battery / capacitor and lens used) but the Xiaomi Yi is 72g.

I need to nip down the shops in a bit to get some dinner so I'll see how it goes.

 

[sp5it]

Firmware 1.0 I charged fully, after 20 hours no use went down to 38%
Old firmware which comes with camera - couple % during 24 hours.
Anyone have old firmware to download? I could test battery drain on my device with old firmware.

Mike

 

[GJHS]

Maybe try to reinstall 1.0.0 and see if that helps. In 24 hours, my battery discharged 23%

 

[reverend]

Looking at the bitrate table for this camera in firmware 1.0 it should go up to 25Mbps - I'm guessing that's in 1920x1080 @ 60fps.

View attachment 11986

That is actually about right - 1080p 60fps video shows the following on the standard firmware:

 

[reverend]

OK it looks like I have shell access to the device

 

[reverend]

The Yi belongs to me (I could be a rapper with those rhyming skills!!)

https://dashcamtalk.com/forum/threads/using-xiaomi-yi-sports-camera-with-iphone-and-vlc.10436/

 

[reverend]

I just formatted a 64GB card in camera and it's used exFAT and records fine to it - that suggests this camera potentially supports 128GB cards so it will be interesting to hear feedback if anyone tries it.

 

[jokiin]

I just formatted a 64GB card in camera and it's used exFAT and records fine to it - that suggests this camera potentially supports 128GB cards so it will be interesting to hear feedback if anyone tries it.

that's good to see

 

[sp5it]

Reflashed firmware 1.0, after 20 hours 100% battery went down to 42%.
Battery drain is too big IMO.
Mike

 

[reverend]

Is it possible to auto record when the camera is connected to the power? i want to install it as dashcam

Here's some footage showing the Yi next to a Lukas dashcam - you can see the Yi records nice enough looking video but the proper dashcam is much more tuned for things like numberplate capture etc.

You can see the Lukas at first glance oversaturates the image but when you look closely you'll see the Lukas makes all the details such as numberplates pop and it is sharpened up much more (surprisingly the Xiaomi Yi doesn't seem to suffer from oversharpening like a lot of Ambarella based cameras).

For this one I'd changed the camera to use centre meter mode as opposed to average and with the way the camera was pointing it looks like it was focussing on making those clouds look lovely

It was pretty hard to get them both in the same direction as neither had screens so it's rough and ready but shows the benefits of using a dashcam which is tuned for details.

In all fairness this also shows that if you wanted too you could use the Yi for a dashcam but don't rely on it as you're bound to forget to start recording the day something happens (sods law!)

@GJHS also has some footage with the Yi being used as a dashcam in this thread:
https://dashcamtalk.com/forum/threads/xiaomi-yi-vs-sjcam-sj4000.10439/

 

[kerenmac]

These little cameras are running a webserver:

View attachment 11992

I haven't managed to get the stream working from the browser yet as you get an error -15 - I'll have more of a tinker when I get home later tonight

No shell access that I've seen though.

I've been investigating inside the Firmware, but compared to the firmware of the SJ5000+ the LNX and LNXFS partitions are missing, so the size of the FW of the Yi file is the half of the size of the FW of the SJ5000+. I'm surprised that it has a webserver, because the partition which stores the code of the webserver in the SJ5000+ is the LNXFS partition, but just to confirm my thoughts i looked for "192.168.42.1" in the files which where extracted from the firmware of the Yi and it didn't find anything, so I'm quite interested in how that can be working if there isn't any code about it in the firmware that you uploaded to MEGA (thanks for that).

Regards.

 

[reverend]

I've got a feeling it was just pure luck it worked and that's also the reason why the firmware.bin on the Android phones are so much bigger.

I've just had a look on my phone but the firmware.bin that was there has disappeared now - if we can lift the raw >50MB file from an Android phone then that should contain everything you're looking for

 

[kerenmac]

I've got a feeling it was just pure luck it worked and that's also the reason why the firmware.bin on the Android phones are so much bigger.

I've just had a look on my phone but the firmware.bin that was there has disappeared now - if we can lift the raw >50MB file from an Android phone then that should contain everything you're looking for

It's good to know that, thanks for the info, I think that your phone has deleted the file because the app might have detected that you already have installed the latest version. I'll try to get the link where the app downloads the firmwares from the code of the Android app, because It's not a good idea to use a FW that does not contain everything that it should. Where did you get the Firmware that you uploaded to MEGA? As the .elf file hasn't been released I think that is quite risky to update the camera at this moment, even with official Firmwares, the updating procedure might be the same which uses the SJ5000+ and DirectUSB has unbricked too many cameras.

 

[reverend]

I extracted the firmware hosted on this site using the autoexec.ash script trick to dump out six of the sections - I'm guessing when it writes it back it just overwrites those six sections that were dumped.

I'm also looking at the APK but so far the URLs I've found haven't worked :/