Anyone have or know of a good IN-CAR security camera w/night vision, that you can turn on and run for a couple hours when the car is parked and off. Good for if you have to park in lot that you don't like or if something feels shady. Did some searches but I couldn't really find anything.

I've been googling around but I can't seem to find any that would be good for leaving on when your car is off and parked, a lot seem to be while your driving. My car was involved in a hit and run a few weeks ago, it's fixed now, but it would be great to have a cam to snag an ID or a plate. Be nice to have that peace of mind as well.

Thanks!

 

No.
i say this as my best friend runs a n IT business and is working a tv show that installs hidden cameras in teens cars, triggers etc.... its quite complicated and not cheap.
Also,
how long will it run? what will trigger it? whats it going to record onto? Are you going to review and erase every night? they make little dvrs etc, but what your asking for is possible, complex, and generally futile.. or they WOULD procide such a thing

Sorry you got hit.. but your best bet is to continue to pay for good insurance, park w thought behind it, and leave it at that.

Hope thats gives you some good food for thought.

 

Perhaps having a 2nd battery or a big capacitor would help with running it overnight with the car off. Maybe adding in some kind of shutoff timer after 24 hours would be good in case you don't drive it for a few days and forget to disable it.

I assume the camera wouldn't take much power.. but having a constantly spinning hard drive would likely gulp it up.

 

You could have the camera go into a sleep mode, and it would either be activated by a bump in the car or motion sensor. The activated sensor could then fire up the DVR, start the camera and record for a designated amount of time. A big issue will be resolution on the camera - you want a camera with night-vision and you want to be able to catch a cars plate, you're going to need a wide angle lens AND high resolution (>480p) and a fast frame rate so that you don't miss a chance to grab the tag. High frame rate + high resolution = lots of data to store, so you would have to remember to delete your storage every couple of days depending on the size of your DVR drive. You'd also need a rear facing camera so you have front and rear covered, but then you have to pray your sides don't get clipped.

I have thought about this many times (i used to park on the street in NYC) and may still make such a system - however I dabble in microelectronics and programming so I would build most of it myself, making it application specific. If you are looking to buy all of the things to piece together a system, it would be possible - but it may be more cost effective to find a place where you can rent a parking space with security cameras, which is what I did after I got keyed and the door kicked in. Even if I had the greatest camera system in my car, catching the back of someones head as they ran off would net me nothing

Hope this helps!

 

Catching someone that is doing it in person (no vehicle) will be much harder and actually require that cops apply some effort to look for the guy. I think this would be most useful if you have some kind of enemy or the same person keeps keying your car, etc.

The motion sensor may be a bit rough. it'd be super useful in a condo parking lot, but less than ideal if you park on a busy street since it will always be on. You also have to consider the lag time for the camera to engage and focus when the sensor activates. Plus the sensor needs to get a handful of frames to determine if there has been motion or not.

..I wonder if there's a camera setup that will monitor in a low resolution to act as the motion sensor and then kick into high res mode when it detects a change. This way it will already be on and already be in focus.

haha.. maybe you should just do the google route and mount a 360 degree camera on top of your car :P

 

You bring up a good point with the motion sensor and the busy street. Using the camera in a low-res mode to detect motion would totally be possible with some signal processing. You would need some good hardware for it, though. But it would make it a nicer install since it is one less sensor to worry about!

as BTarb said, the google camera idea is the best bet

 

Maybe i'll just hire a midget with a camcorder to sit in my car every night. I'll crack a window. Thanks for the insight guys

 

lol, awesome idea. Maybe give him some mini nunchucks so he can take out the perp while he's at it :P

 

*Thinking out loud* It would be cool if they made an app that you could actually have a live video feed from your car to your phone....

 

I use a panasonic bl-c210. It has motion and sound detection and will pan/tilt in the direction of the motion. It is also PoE, so it doesn't draw a lot of power if you supply the voltage directly instead of using a power inverter, injector, etc. It has internal storage and can also transfer the video (with sound too) to another storage device if you provide ethernet/network connectivity inside the car. As mentioned earlier, your best bet is a separate dedicated battery for powering your security devices as opposed to powering them off of your main battery.

You can control different trigger actions based on whether it was sound activated, motion(heat) activated, or movement (frame difference) activated.

 

With the panasonic that I mentioned above, you can use a Verizon 4G mifi/USB and a firewall/router to host the camera's feed live over the Internet - assuming that you have wireless coverage. It will even update a dynamic DNS entry if the IP address for the Internet connection changes so that you can always get to your camera.

Only problem is that it is easy to max out on your data plan if you use the remote access to the live feed a lot.

 

That sounds like a really cool device! it looks like it is fairly sizable though (assuming it doesn't disconnect from the white cube). Where were you able to mount yours?

 

It is a 3.5" cube. I had mine mounted in the center of the dash, pushed back against the windshield, above the waterfall gauges, and facing backwards towards the cabin compartment. This was great for me since I'm in a roadster and wanted to mainly catch anyone reaching into the cabin area. Not sure what arrangement would be best for a coupe?

Car is completely torn apart right now for new interior work, or I'd send you a picture of it sitting there so that you could have a frame of reference for its size.

 

Wanted to share this related PM question:

I had a second battery in trunk that provided power for camera, wireless Internet, NAS drive, and firewall. Everything expected either 5V, 9V or 12V DC, so a buddy build me a circuit that gave me the different voltages that I needed from the battery. I ran that voltage directly to the devices instead of using the standard power plugs that come with the devices and plug into 110V AC power. These things don't draw much power when using the DC voltage.

Trying to use a power inverter to get 110V AC so that you can use the power packs that come with the equipment would have been a fail.

 

I will recommend few shops to you for buying a good quality security camera for your requirement.

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This thread's been dead for almost a year and a half.