RIDEYE: The Black Box Camera For Your Bike

[rcannon100]

Contour Roam.

[vvill]

I like the concept. Ease of use, great battery life, and I’m assuming it’s some sort of quick release off the mount. A little boxy perhaps.

[consularrider]

@vvill 64335 wrote:

… A little boxy perhaps.

Maybe that’s why the subtitle for the thread is “The Black Box Camera for your Bike?” :p

[americancyclo]

Monoprice action cam? $79
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=117&cp_id=11704&cs_id=1170401&p_id=10159&seq=1&format=2

[DSalovesh]

Contour stuff will quickly go out of stock unless someone buys their patents and starts production. I kinda wish they would because their mounts were awesome, but they would have to take on GoPro, Garmin, this, and a bunch of cheap and barely useful alternatives. That said, REI still has some in stock at 25% off.

To me the super-interesting feature of RIDEYE is how it automatically overwrites older rides if it needs space. Memory management has been the biggest hassle of running a cam for every ride – it’s nothing to plug a camera into a power supply so it’s fresh in the morning, but there have been so many times I would get three blocks into the ride and hear the camera shut down for lack of storage. And hardly any of the daily ride videos have been at all remarkable.

I’m not sure the crash detection feature will help anything, and I can imagine some ways it could screw things up. But as long as it can save the file without stopping the recording it might protect the evidence better. (If nobody turns the camera off after it crashes it’ll eventually run out of battery and/or space, which corrupts files.)

[peterw_diy]

1) “Water resistant” is insufficient. All-weather commuters like me will rule it out immediately. Others will be pretty unhappy if the camera gets trashed in the first unexpected downpour. And you can’t expect riders to stash this in an Ortlieb when clouds appear; to be effective, a black box needs to stay on the bike at all times. More on water & rain below.

2) Crash detection sounds nice for the very rare serious crash use case, but it would be nice to have another button I could use to save a video on demand. Pressing the button should save a file going back about two minutes and going forward until I turn the camera off. I’d use this to stash video of close calls (for me or others!) or other interesting footage.

3) It would be great if it was designed to operate in groups of two or more cameras, with wireless connections. Push the on demand save button and have both front- and rear-facing cameras stash footage going back two minutes.

4) How easy is it to pull videos off the device? My commuter bike stays in the detached garage. Connecting a charging cable is easy, but pulling movies off the camera is a hassle. Rideye looks like a USB Windows-formatted disk drive to a computer, right? It should put “saved” videos in a separate folder, to make it easier to pull them off the camera. You could probably even write a pretty simple utility for PCs and Macs that would automatically recognize the Rideye & move its “saved” videos to the PC/Mac, so extracting saved videos would only mean waking up the PC/Mac, connecting the cable, and waiting for the utility to announce that it got everything it needed.

5) But don’t make it too easy to pull the videos off. As a commuter, I like gear I can leave bolted to the bike so it won’t get stolen. With cameras, it’s more than just the loss of a $100 device though, it’s also the value of the videos recorded on the device. Pull a video from one of my HD808s and you’ll see my route, my house, and learn which neighbors I wave to. My ideal black box camera would use good encryption so that a thief (or busybody with a laptop & USB cable) wouldn’t be able to do anything with the videos on the device.

6) Back to water resistance — that lens looks awfully exposed. Even if it were waterproof, the lens is bound to get pelted with rain, at best distorting the video. It needs a hood to keep the lens relatively dry. A lens hood should also help reduce glare problems from off-axis light, both natural and artificial.

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