Last December I just bought a rear view dash camera for my car as a Christmas present to my self. It was on sale and is cheap so I purchased it immediately. Because of my excitement I just tested it for just a few seconds and confirmed that it is working ok. My biggest mistake was I thrown the box and receipt already before finding out that this unit has defects. 🙁
The defect was the front camera hangs after few minutes. All other things are working fine, the rear camera is working and recording well. From what I can observe, the culprit seems to be the front camera because all other functions are good and the rear camera is recording well. I also have changed the SD card many time and I even changed the video resolution to VGA and still get the same result. If the issue is the speed of the SD card, it should have been fixed by setting the resolution to VGA.
Out of curiosity I decided to tear down the unit and see what’s inside and see if there is something I can do to fix it.
Surprisingly it is using a very small board and the layout seems so simple.
The front camera is unknown. 🙁 Unfortunately I can’t find any information about the camera on the internet. So replacing it will be an impossible task.
LCD removed, exposing the very small battery and speaker. The battery is only there to power the device 10 seconds after the engine is off. It is not really intended to power the device alone because it is too tiny.
LCD is a 4.3 inch TFT. If I can’t really fixed this device, at least I can use its LCD for different project.
Unfortunately it is using an unknown processor JL AC1736 which is nowhere to be found on the internet. 🙁 If only it uses a known processor then I can just study and re-program it but I find any information so I can’t do anything on it.
Conclusion:
It was a big lesson for me to never trust unbranded gadgets. This is because you can’t really rely on them. Quality is not good and service is bad or none at all. It is really a waste of time and money to purchase one of these. You will be better of spending extra money for branded gadgets, they are more reliable and there are service centers in case you encounter problems.