Destructo-Bot
Spy
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2006
- Messages
- 273
- Reaction score
- 6
This is the sequel to my robotic vacuum post 
Anyone remember the meteor that whizzed over Russia not to terribly long ago? Apparently everyone has a dash-cam there so there was lots of pretty cool footage floating around. Also, it's seems to be a thing for pedestrians to fling themselves in front of moving cars in order to extort an insurance payout, which is the root cause of why everyone there has a dash-cam. After seeing the neat footage and the potential for having a black box of sorts around for an accident, the novelty of one of these dash-cam was compelling. So I went ahead and bought one, here's some info for anyone else interested.
The one I got was a Roadhawk HD, which uses the same video sensor as a GoPro and combines it with black box functionality. It has a built in microphone, GPS, and accelerometer, so it will record your speed, location, and anything you say or hear and the g-forces being experienced. Pretty neat. You can disable the microphone however, if you'd like. One of the interesting inclusions of their software is a real-time overlay of your position on google maps as the video plays, pretty handy stuff. More interesting however is the event trigger, if the accelerometers detect an "event" (sudden stopping, swerving) it will write-protect the current video file and save it to an events folder for permanent storage. The day to day recording are on a loop, when the card fills up, the oldest video is recorded over. There is a button you can press on the unit to manually create an event if you see something and want to save it.
I've uploaded some of my initial trips to youtube as examples. I've been playing with the settings to see what I like the best. There are options to records at 1920x1080 x30fps or 1280x720 x60fps, and I like the 720p60fps the best so far due to the smoother motion. It will accept memory cards up to 64GB in size, which will record about a month's worth of video for me.
The below links are just the videos, if you view the files in their software you also get a speed, force meter, and GPS maps overlay (here's a pictures of their software at work):
Here are the samples I took this morning and night... click the pictures for the video links.
Anyone remember the meteor that whizzed over Russia not to terribly long ago? Apparently everyone has a dash-cam there so there was lots of pretty cool footage floating around. Also, it's seems to be a thing for pedestrians to fling themselves in front of moving cars in order to extort an insurance payout, which is the root cause of why everyone there has a dash-cam. After seeing the neat footage and the potential for having a black box of sorts around for an accident, the novelty of one of these dash-cam was compelling. So I went ahead and bought one, here's some info for anyone else interested.
The one I got was a Roadhawk HD, which uses the same video sensor as a GoPro and combines it with black box functionality. It has a built in microphone, GPS, and accelerometer, so it will record your speed, location, and anything you say or hear and the g-forces being experienced. Pretty neat. You can disable the microphone however, if you'd like. One of the interesting inclusions of their software is a real-time overlay of your position on google maps as the video plays, pretty handy stuff. More interesting however is the event trigger, if the accelerometers detect an "event" (sudden stopping, swerving) it will write-protect the current video file and save it to an events folder for permanent storage. The day to day recording are on a loop, when the card fills up, the oldest video is recorded over. There is a button you can press on the unit to manually create an event if you see something and want to save it.
I've uploaded some of my initial trips to youtube as examples. I've been playing with the settings to see what I like the best. There are options to records at 1920x1080 x30fps or 1280x720 x60fps, and I like the 720p60fps the best so far due to the smoother motion. It will accept memory cards up to 64GB in size, which will record about a month's worth of video for me.
The below links are just the videos, if you view the files in their software you also get a speed, force meter, and GPS maps overlay (here's a pictures of their software at work):
Here are the samples I took this morning and night... click the pictures for the video links.
