"Wooden Ragtag In-Vehicle Camera" - A dash camera for you car, consisting of a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, LEDs, and Push-buttons - all fitting inside a wooden box from A.C. Moore.
Dash Cameras are extremely useful: they can be used to capture evidence of accidents on the road, proving that it was not you, but the hooligan in front of you, that caused the collision. They can also be used to record clips of you driving down some awesome roads (like I-77 heading from Virginia into West Virginia). However, there's one problem: they're pretty expensive.
Behold, a cheap solution to the problem! I'm building this dash cam to address this issue: I would like to have a dash cam for the reasons I described above, but I don't want to pay too much for it. (I'm also using this as a way to learn about Raspberry Pis and improve my Python knowledge.)
The dash cam has the following features:
- Passive Recording: Records video clips every ~10 minutes, and stores up to 5 hours of footage. Once it's full of videos, the oldest clip is overwritten with the next clip.
- Image Capturing: Via the click of a button, the dash cam will take a picture.
- LED Indicators: Multiple LEDs indicate the status of the camera's inner workings: one "running light" (when the camera is powered on), one "rolling light" (when the camera is recording), and one "auxiliary light" (an extra light for any features I may add in the future)
- (These LEDs also have separate meanings when in the dash cam's configuration mode)
- Session Logging: The camera logs every "tick" of its main loop, marking any updates, errors, or hardware changes.
- CPU Temperature Detection: Since dash cams sit in cars all day long, I'm expecting the Raspberry Pi to get hot. If the CPU's temperature rises above some threshold, the Pi is shut down.
- Flash-Drive file dumping: Through a config menu, the output files (videos, images, logs) can be sent to a plugged-in flash drive.
Below are some sample images taken from my raspberry pi 3b+ running this code.
Links to sample videos recorded on the same machine can be found here:
- Sample 1: https://youtu.be/1qI8dHIZC_s
- Sample 2: https://youtu.be/cg1fkrqQ5Ho