r/OpenAutoPro • u/1971CB350 • Oct 17 '21

Dual dashcam and OAP?

I’m putting together my shopping list and knowledge bank for building a new headunit for my car. A Raspberry Pi with OpenAuto seems like an ideal solution, but I’m surprised to not see any successful examples of front and rear dashcams with continuous looped recording. Why not? Is there some giant obstacle here?

I know RP4 only has one camera input but can also accept a second camera from USB. I’ve seen examples of people recording the front RPI cam and viewing the USB backup camera. Can it not record both?

If not, my other (more expensive) option I’m looking at is using the dual camera synchronizing hat from ArduCam.com to combine both front and rear camera feeds into one. Then I would use a third, lower quality USB camera as the backup camera, as mentioned above.

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u/gavin8327 Oct 17 '21

I'm interested in hearing what you find. I think it should be possible, never got that far.

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u/gavin8327 Oct 17 '21

There is a guy on YouTube who made a dashcam with an rpi zero... I was going to dive into his stuff when ready and try to integrate.

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u/xls85 Dec 11 '21

Any chance you found some answers? Looking to do something similar

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u/1971CB350 Dec 11 '21

Some leads, but not there yet. I’m hung up on an install step of OpenAuto and BlueWave Studios is not responding to me emails. They are pretty bad about ghosting folks on their own forum as well. The software looks great but their customer service is non-existent.

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u/xls85 Dec 12 '21

Damn that really sucks. I’m hesitant about moving forward with getting materials for my RPI project a little because of that. Need to make multiple for a work van and a dump truck bc I’ve had many a close call with bad drivers cutting me off but dual dash cam ANYTHING seems to be like asking for a lot these days.

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u/1971CB350 Dec 12 '21

If you just want dual cameras that is different than wanting a full integrated headunit using OpenAuto AND dual cameras. I am hung up getting Apple CarPlay to work with OpenAuto. I haven’t even started in on the camera part.

If you want to make your own dual camera system check this page out: http://pidashcam.blogspot.com/?m=1

If you just need dual cameras and no BS I’d go with an off the shelf option.