Dashcam

Overview

The dashcam is a windshield-mounted camera that continuously records the road ahead and behind while a vehicle is driven or parked. A wide-angle Front Camera Module captures the front view in 4K, a separate Rear Camera Module watches the road behind, and both streams are encoded and written to a microSD card in short looped clips so the oldest footage is overwritten once the card fills. A GPS receiver stamps each clip with location and speed, and a G-sensor flags sudden impacts so those clips are locked against the loop.

The whole unit hangs from the windshield on the Housing & Mount, whose suction or adhesive mount and ball joint let the camera be aimed level with the horizon. Power comes from the vehicle through the 12 V Power Cable, which steps the 12 V supply down to the 5 V the electronics expect. When the engine is off, parking mode keeps watching for bumps and motion, drawing on the Power Storage to close the current file cleanly if power is cut.

How it works

Light passes through the wide-angle lens and IR-cut filter onto the CMOS image sensor inside the Front Camera Module, which converts it to a digital pixel stream. That stream feeds the Main Board, where the video SoC compresses it into an H.264/H.265 file. The microcontroller manages the loop: it splits recording into one- to three-minute segments, writes them to the card through the microSD slot, and deletes the oldest segments to make room. The rear camera feeds a second stream over its cable into the same board, recorded in parallel.

The GPS module fixes position from satellite signals and the inertial measurement unit, acting as the G-sensor, reports acceleration on three axes. A hard jolt above a threshold marks the active clip as an event so it survives the loop. Wi-Fi lets a phone pull footage and change settings without removing the card. During playback the rear-view Display & Buttons shows what is being recorded, while the Audio Assembly assembly captures in-cabin sound and plays back alerts. When the vehicle is switched off, the supercapacitor in the power-storage pack holds enough charge to finish writing the last file, and parking mode wakes the camera to record briefly whenever the G-sensor or motion detection is triggered.