Fitting a dashcam to a BMW i3

Part #14 of the "Roger Writes" series - Oct 2024

Background

With the number of idiots on the road, a Dashcam is a sensible addition to any car.

I've used the Viofo range before, and they seem to offer a good level of price/performance, so looked at their latest range, and went for the Viofo A229. This has a 4K front camera, and a 2K rear camera, with Wi-Fi connectivity to view/download the footage. I used a SanDisk Max endurance card, to minimise problems with SD card wear. I also got the HK4 hardware kit, that allows for parking mode (but haven't enabled this yet, see later).

Fitting

The front and rear cameras should be mounted within the swept area of the screen, and out of the drivers line of sight as much as possible.

It's a right-hand drive car, so I've put the front camera to the left of the rear-view mirror. The unit is almost completely hidden by the mirror from the driver's point of view.

The two cables (power and rear-camera signal) are pushed behind the trim, along the top of the screen, around the top of the pillar:

From here the power cables, go down behind the rubber

Then through the dash towards the central cigarette lighter for power.

The dash was clipped back togther (and after this picture the cables tied up behind the panel):

The rear camera signal goes along the edge of the headlining, around the central catch:

Towards the back of the car:

The back door panel pops off, mount the camera, and then we need to run the cable:

The hinge cover can be removed with a T25 torx, use a trim tool to pop open the cable clip:

Pass the rear camera cable through and re-assemble:

Feed the spare cables bhind the side trim:

Clip the panel back on, and all done: Power up and test!

Future

The BMW detects the power draw in parking mode, so I've disabled it for now. You can get battery packs that charge during normal use, and power the camer in parking mode for a few hours. I'm looking to use one of these (there is plenty of space behind the lower dash for this).

The Roger Writes series

I research / dabble with lots of things, and figured that if I write my notes here, I can quickly reference them, also, sometimes, they are useful to others!
Here is what I have so far:

Fitting a dashcam to a BMW i3 (RW#14 - October 2024)
Cosplay Arduino programming (RW#13 - June 2024)
ATU-100 modifications (RW#12 - February 2024)
Garage door open warning (RW#11 - January 2024)
Horizontal Halos and Vs (RW#10 - December 2023)
Faking Dell PSUs (RW#9 - December 2023)
Designing NEC2 antennas (RW#8 - November 2023)
4NEC2 antenna models (RW#7 - October 2023)
3-element cubical quad for 2m (RW#6 - September 2023)
Cobwebb Antenna dimensions (RW#5 - August 2023)
WS2812 and similar 'Smart' LEDs (RW#4 - January 2023)
Investigation and details of the AFHDS-2A protocol (RW#3 - June 2022)
Changes we've made to our caravan (RW#2 - January 2022)
Basic solar/battery/off-grid calculations (RW#1 - January 2022)
Credit card size walking robot aka Monster-Chan (RW#0 - Originally 2016 - Moved here 2022)
Why you should avoid certain number of drives with ZFS (aka why isn't my ZFS/raidz array the size I expected)
Simple way to connect a Servo to a PC (RS232 port)
Using ZFS with FreeBSD

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This page was lasted updated on Monday, 18-Nov-2024 18:17:53 GMT