fc3

My previous car was destroyed by a man who had a seizure, lost consciousness and control of his pickup, totaling my car. The car I had before my last one was destroyed by a trucker who thought it would be wonderful to make a left turn from the right lane. Considering how too many people drive, it seems a good idea to install a dash camera. And since the last time my car was destroyed, it was from behind, a dual camera setup seemed to be the right thing.

As you all know, there's no easy power connection in the forward part of the cabin. Since I had to run the data cable from the rear window to the windshield, seemed to make sense to pull the power cable the same way. The problem is, my E400, like most modern cars, has side curtain airbags that run from the A pillar and continues to the C pillar. Running wires would have to avoid crossing the airbags, or would have to cross behind them. As you can see in the photo, the airbag begins nearly at the base of the A pillar and extends about 2" into the C pillar.

The easiest (ha!) thing was to get some space between the roof and the headliner and push the cables well inside, away from the airbag. It wasn't horrible to do, but it was stress inducing removing the sun visors, the A pillar trim, the front and rear grab handles, the trim moulding around the front and rear passenger doors, the top half of the B pillar trim, and the C pillar trim.

I would have captured a few more photographs, but daylight faded more quickly than I anticipated. Racing against daylight, I didn't have time to run inside and get the 580EX-II Speedlight for my 6D. But this is the key photo.

The rest was pretty simple. Getting the C pillar trim back into place is a little finicky as you first have to align the pin for the rear sunshade, then the locator pins that retain the trim piece. But once all aligned, it goes together smoothly.

212swe

Nice setup What kind of dash camera do you use?

Did same but only removed a-pillar the rest I stuffed in cable fast and easy! You can se from 5:00 in this video below.

fc3

I installed a Thinkware Q800 Pro with the front and rear cameras. Front camera is 2K QHD 2560 × 1440 and the rear camera is regular HD 1920 × 1080. It has Sony Starvis sensors, so it's pretty good in the dark. Canon has an even crazier low light sensor, but those are insane money.

I'm an avid amateur photographer and videographer so image quality is important to me. For the money, the Q800 seemed about the best on the market short of their U1000, but that's nearly twice the price and I really didn't think I needed that much resolution. Anyway, you can judge for yourself. I pulled a segment from last night, about 8:20 PM. The only post-processing that I did in Final Cut Pro X on my Mac Pro was inserting the rear camera's image into the top right of the front camera's video. I didn't do any filtering or cleaning of the video.

I'm fussy about, umm well everything, so getting the installation right was a big deal to me. And getting the right camera was a big deal. Which, I guess, goes along with getting the right car.

The sample video is here on my personal website, which runs at home on a small LAMP server next to my desk. Full screen on a big monitor works best as I published the full 2K QHD video.

212swe

Understand you, thinking same but my lazy side doing the easy way sometimes Going to buy another Garmin 55 to use as rear camera then I going to hardwire both of them and do a proper install.

Not same quality like yours, but it doing its jobb. Checked out on my MacBook picture quality really crisp

ghlkal

Nice work, and thanks for posting this.

I like your philosophy

nota_amg

I too was looking for a dual camera setup, and wound up actually getting 2 single cameras and a y-splitter for the power cable as it was less than half the price of buying a decent dual lens setup(2 Aukey DRA1 1080p cameras & two 64gb cards for less than $100usd). Since the cigar lighter is "accessory position dependent", I'll be pulling my OHP and tapping into a power source there for the cameras for 24hr protection and no unsightly cables. Both are mounted to the windshield just behind the rearview mirror since I occasionally drive for a rideshare.