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So this arrived, and it's surprisingly high quality in terms of fit and finish. The vents on the dashcam trim are slightly different style to the ones on the car, but the quality/color of the plastic is basically identical. So it delivers on aesthetics. It comes with a little pry tool, and removing the trim on the car is super easy. It also comes with a wiring harness that piggybacks off the rain sensor's connector, which was good quality and plugged in no problem. At this point I'd spent maybe 5 minutes on the install and should have been done. So I go to fire up the defender to start setting up the dashcam but it doesn't turn on... The problem is that the wiring harness must be for an older model, or possibly even based on a different JLR product that uses the same rain sensor module. After some investigation I noticed the accessory wire was drawing from a pin that isn't being used on my defender, and the power wire is on a pin that reads -9v when the car is on. I did a bit of messing about trying to find +12v in the connector without success and ran out of time to mess with it. I did however hook it directly up to a battery and the dashcam works fine, image quality seems pretty good too.
Does anyone have the wiring diagram for the rain sensor module? If there is 12v on one of those 6 wires it'd be a simple fix. Re-arranging the pins on the harness is quite simple with a little pin tool, and would probably turn this into a 15-20 minute job for @DefendTheFarm and other interested. Worst case I might have to go the powerfuluk route and get power from the reading lights, I believe they sell a harness, want to avoid tapping into any wires.
Decent packaging Trim cover comparison Just plugs straight in yellow ACC wire is on an empty pin close up on defenders wire layout
The actual equipment appears okay, but what throws me is the description on the owners manual of the camera in your photos, where is says ‘BUTTON DESCRIPTION OF DRIVING RECORDER’. And the packaging labeling in Chinese with another clunky translation below it which appears to say, ‘SMART AUXILIARY DRIVE CONTROL SYSTEM’, or similar. I like the one Powerfuluk installed with the rear facing camera included.
The actual equipment appears okay, but what throws me is the description on the owners manual of the camera in your photos, where is says ‘BUTTON DESCRIPTION OF DRIVING RECORDER’. And the packaging labeling in Chinese with another clunky translation below it which appears to say, ‘SMART AUXILIARY DRIVE CONTROL SYSTEM’, or similar. I like the one Powerfuluk installed with the rear facing camera included.
Oh 100% the manual and the app are absolutely terrible. The manual isn't really an issue as it's extremely straight forward to install, well it would have been if their harness was right (it's an easy fix, will post on that soon) . The App is pretty garbage, but it does work, you can change the settings, review recordings/photos and download clips to your phone. Once it's setup you'll probably never use the app again and just download the videos directly from the SD card, but it is there if needed.
The main pro of this one over the land rover one is the stealthy OEM looking finished result. It doesn't take away any windscreen space, and you can't see any wires or suction cups/mounts/stands. The land rover one is quite bulky, I probably would have gone for the garmin one simon tried if I had not found this one. This one also happens to be 1/3 the price ($200 vs $600 USD) and its 4k vs 1080p. There are also versions of this that do come with a rear camera as well, but they were all 1080p. Personally I didn't want to bother running the wire for the rear camera, I've done it before in other vehicles and it was not worth the effort. So I chose 4k over a rear camera.
Another interesting idea might be to go and get the cheapest one of these (<$100) and modify it to use as a camera mount for a higher quality dash cam. Something where both the front and rear camera are separate from the unit would fit very easily I'd imagine, or if you are brave you could disassemble one and move the electronics over.
So I got some time last night to figure out the wiring, and I discovered the rain sensor harness does indeed have +12v ACC. It is on Pin #1 (the blue/brown wire in my photo above), and the Negative/Ground is Pin #14 (black wire in photo above). So to fix the wiring harness they supply you just need a pin removal tool and you can swap the pins around in the harness. On the female side of the harness I swapped the black wire from pin1 to pin14, and yellow from pin5 to pin1. Remove the Red from Pin4, and put the blue removed from Pin14 into Pin4. Pin5 is not used by my defender, so I'll be leaving it blank so I can connect the Red and Yellow wires for the dashcam together without any cutting/soldering. On the male side you'll do the same as the female, except move the Red wire to Pin1, and leave the yellow removed. Then you simply just connect the removed yellow directly to the removed red. Put some electrical tape around the exposed red/yellow connection and you are good to go. This results in the dashcam starting up and shutting down at the same times as pivipro does. As there is no direct battery connection you loose the parking monitoring feature, but you also don't have to worry about the dashcam giving you a dead battery.
Looking at PowerfulUK's Garmin install video, the harness he uses gets a +12v Battery connection, but no Accessory signal. they went and made a very creative smart module that creates a fake Accessory signal that turns on/off with the engine. Their harness works off the reading lights, which seem to use exactly the same connector the rain sensor does. I'm trying to get the seller to send me a 2nd wiring harness that I can plug into the reading lights and use it to run a battery signal that I can just pop into Pin5 that I left blank on the main harness.
I also got a chance to play around with it and recorded a sample video. The quality is decent, remember to manually set it to 4k in the youtube settings. The audio goes silent at 20 seconds as youtube didn't like the song I had playing. The 4k isn't that much better than a standard 1080p dashcam, but it is an improvement. The dashcam settings only allow 4k/30fps, so you can't do 1080p/60 which might have been nice. There aren't many useful settings beyond the wifi password and the clip length (1 - 5 minutes), and the parking mode length (12,24,48 hours). The camera also isn't quite straight which is annoying, it should be as simple as rotating the lens a little bit, ran out of time last night to look into it.
I love the stock look. Wish JLR had incorporated dash cams into Pivi Pro. Is there a rear camera available as well?
Yeah, it was quite stupid of them not to have integrated it into pivipro, the cameras are already there! They could even have made it an additional cost feature to enable the software, low hanging fruit right there.
Anyway, yes there are versions with a rear camera. There are quite a few different options on aliexpress. I couldn't find a 4k version that came with a rear camera, but there are a few 1080p versions that had a rear camera, which are even cheaper again. They all have the exact same outer trim, it's just the electronics inside that differ. There are a ton of different listings of the exact same product that are all slightly different. One thing to note about aliexpress in general is that they don't release any of the money to the seller until you have received the item and are happy with it. So its some nice protection for you if it doesn't arrive, or you get a bad unit. The sellers I've dealt with have all been very motivated to help with any questions I've had.
The camera also isn't quite straight which is annoying, it should be as simple as rotating the lens a little bit, ran out of time last night to look into it.
Impressive at that price. But rotating the lens won't change the image - it's the sensor or camera body that needs to rotate. Does it look like that is possible?
Impressive at that price. But rotating the lens won't change the image - it's the sensor or camera body that needs to rotate. Does it look like that is possible?
Lol, smart *** :P But from memory it looked easy to remove the dashcam from the trim, I don't know exactly how it's mounted inside as that was under a cover. I'm hoping the fact that it's not straight means the way it mounts lets it be rotated/adjusted. Perhaps I bumped it during the install... I'll update when I get a chance to look at it. I was meaning to ask the seller about this and had forgotten, thanks for the reminder, we'll see what they say.
Impressive at that price. But rotating the lens won't change the image - it's the sensor or camera body that needs to rotate. Does it look like that is possible?
just fixed it, the camera module wasn't clipped in straight inside the dashcam. there are two small screws, cover comes off and everything is right there. just had to re-seat the camera and it went in straight.
10-04-2021, 01:47 PM
