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Been having a think about dashcam solutions and I was wondering if anyone has come up with a way to pipe the defenders onboard camera signals into a multichannel DVR? Kind of like the setups they use on big trucks to record multiple cameras. I haven't looked into details of how the defenders cameras are setup, but I'd imagine there must be a way to get this working and wanted to see if anyone had given it any thought? This is honestly something that should be part of pivi-pro, it just feels dumb to add more cameras to a vehicle that already has cameras everywhere!
That is just a standalone dashcam that can be installed in any vehicle, and is no different to any off the shelf dashcam except that it says land rover on it. I'm talking about recording the feeds from the cameras from the 360 camera system, that would be the ultimate dashcam right there.
That is just a standalone dashcam that can be installed in any vehicle, and is no different to any off the shelf dashcam except that it says land rover on it. I'm talking about recording the feeds from the cameras from the 360 camera system, that would be the ultimate dashcam right there.
i agree, it would make sense to take advantage of the built-in cameras. I would like to think they are IP cameras and there would be an interface via the Pivi Pro unit. But then I just saw a pig fly over my house.
This is my first Land Rover, can the workshop manuals be downloaded? If they were IP cams that would be magic, get a little raspberry Pi and a switch and your good to go. I doubt we'd get anything out of pivipro, more likely would have to access the signal before it gets to the cars modules.
@Iceman153 - you need to go to TOPIx. JLR's on-line info site. To access anything you need to pay a subscription. I think there are hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/annually subscriptions and it is $$$$. Pick as short as you want. Not sure you can download the whole thing but you can print (PDF?) parts of it you need.
In the lower left, select "Independent Operator" and it will then take your $$ to enter. Not a great deal of content, but there is the workshop manual.
Other than being made by Bosch, there's not a lot of information available that I could find.
The few images are mostly line drawings and one shows a coax video cable with twisted pair for power but that could be an older stock image. Another image shows a 4 or 5 conductor shielded din cable which is more common in recent JLR's but, again, could be an old stock image.
Ideally, analog would be the easiest to tap. Proprietary digital would be stiff cheese.
You would be looking for the camera control module part number and vehicle location, part numbers for a camera, and part numbers for a wiring harness. Could then order a camera with wiring and figure out what it is.
It's an option that Bosch could easily build for a couple hundred at wholesale and LR could retail it at $2800 but, then again, we can't even get lane centering.
What they REALLY should have done is a co-brand with GoPro to record 360 4k video. That would be an absolute category killer. Too bad the GoPro CEO is one of the worst in all of tech or that might actually have a chance on some car some day. Or would this just encourage total stupidity?
Wow, so $30 USD per hour to look at the workshop manual or like $40 for the day. It'd be well worth getting it for a day or two and printing everything to PDF :P
@_Allegedly thats still some useful info, I'll be pulling the bumpers soon to have them painted and I'm pretty sure there is at least one camera in either the front or rear bumper. If the cable is one of those two options then there is a high chance the signal is analog and if so we're in business. It would just be a matter of creating a harness to make things plug and play and finding a decent multi channel DVR. Sounds like something that Powerfuluk would be very interested in.
collaboration with GoPro would have been genius, that would definitely sell a lot of cars. Even just simply having the ability to record the streams integrated into PiviPro would be a killer option.
Last edited by Iceman153; Aug 4, 2021 at 11:51 AM.
So I pulled off the front/rear bumpers on the weekend, to remove the silver pieces for painting. Those inserts definitely were not designed with removal in mind... Anyway, sore fingers aside, I got some pictures of the camera connectors and the camera unit itself. It looks like there is only a simple coax wire that goes into the camera, and I don't see a separate wire for power.
The other line going into the camera below is water for the washer unit (its the rear camera). The only electrical connection going into the camera itself is via that coax connector. Is the camera module passive and doesn't need power? or is power delivered on the same wires it uses for the signal? This might end up being quite simple if it's just a passive analog signal.
Defender DVR?
