I've been fairly worried reading about people who have problems proving who's at fault in insurance claims. There's no way I'd be able to afford insurance on the coupe without any NCB. My friend recently ran in to some trouble with a guy that decided to do a 3 point turn in a 60 mph zone, it ended up going 50/50 and he had to fork out for his £600 excess. All because there were no witnesses.
So I thought I'd do something about it
I purchased the following off ebay for £100.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HD-1080P-...358?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4aafa4f906
It came from HK and took around 12 days to arrive. There's an option to have a GPS attachment so you get speed and position information (£125), but I was rather afraid of incriminating myself
. They could work it out by calculating the distance and time obviously, but it's unlikely unless it's really serious.
It's called a v1000, the GPS one is a v1000GS.
There's a review on youtube for the actual camera here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4rwMV7hhaY
I also bought an 8GB class 6 microSD card. It needs to be class 6 for 1080p recording. This cost about £9 on amazon. A 5 minute recording is around 300MB, so your looking at about 2 hours worth of storage. The best features are cycle recording and auto start with power. So it'll start and stop itself with the ignition and overwrite the oldest files if they aren't marked as read only (there's a button to save a section of footage).
I also took some sample footage, knock it up to 1080p to see it in full detail, a section of boring commute to work, nothing interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJWDEe1FeCY
This arrived:
First job was to get the power wires connected inside the unit so I didn't have to have the power connector plugged in to the bottom of the unit. I'm a bit of a tidy freak
Just a few screw to get in to it and if you're remotely decent with a soldering iron you'll have no problems.
I could have used the mount and window sucker but I wanted it more out of the way, so I knocked up a bracket with some old brass sheet I had laying around. Unfortunately no pictures of this stage but you can see the general shape of it. There's two screw holes on the camera for the standard bracket to I reused them for the custom bracket.
This slides nicely into the roof, the roof lining pushes it firmly again the roof so it's surprisingly solid. I also covered it in single sides foam (it was actually pipe insulation) to help stop vibrations.
Next job was to get the map lights out so I could tap in to the power source. Very simply jab a flat blade screw driver in to each side nearest you and it falls right out.
Peel back the sticky loom tape and you'll find a violet-white wire and a few brown-black wires. The violet wire is a fused switched +12v (ignition position 1) and the brown-black wires are earths. This is part of the rain/light sensor, I'm unsure of how it'll be for the convertible or M.
See here for wiring diagrams:
http://wds.spaghetticoder.org/en/svg/sp/SP0000023762.svg?m=e8385
Soldered into the the loom
I decided to use spade connectors so I could remove it without having to de-solder.
Make sure you connect to the correct + / - and don't short the wires!
Or you end up with this :
http://www.z4-forum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=33711
Trial fitment, you can see it's not particularly obtrusive to the drivers view:
View from outside:
The yellow light is a reflection of the camera flash don't worry
Job done
Hope this comes in handy if anyone else is looking at doing the same
So I thought I'd do something about it
I purchased the following off ebay for £100.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HD-1080P-...358?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4aafa4f906
It came from HK and took around 12 days to arrive. There's an option to have a GPS attachment so you get speed and position information (£125), but I was rather afraid of incriminating myself
. They could work it out by calculating the distance and time obviously, but it's unlikely unless it's really serious.It's called a v1000, the GPS one is a v1000GS.
There's a review on youtube for the actual camera here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4rwMV7hhaY
I also bought an 8GB class 6 microSD card. It needs to be class 6 for 1080p recording. This cost about £9 on amazon. A 5 minute recording is around 300MB, so your looking at about 2 hours worth of storage. The best features are cycle recording and auto start with power. So it'll start and stop itself with the ignition and overwrite the oldest files if they aren't marked as read only (there's a button to save a section of footage).
I also took some sample footage, knock it up to 1080p to see it in full detail, a section of boring commute to work, nothing interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJWDEe1FeCY
This arrived:
First job was to get the power wires connected inside the unit so I didn't have to have the power connector plugged in to the bottom of the unit. I'm a bit of a tidy freak
Just a few screw to get in to it and if you're remotely decent with a soldering iron you'll have no problems.
I could have used the mount and window sucker but I wanted it more out of the way, so I knocked up a bracket with some old brass sheet I had laying around. Unfortunately no pictures of this stage but you can see the general shape of it. There's two screw holes on the camera for the standard bracket to I reused them for the custom bracket.
This slides nicely into the roof, the roof lining pushes it firmly again the roof so it's surprisingly solid. I also covered it in single sides foam (it was actually pipe insulation
) to help stop vibrations.Next job was to get the map lights out so I could tap in to the power source. Very simply jab a flat blade screw driver in to each side nearest you and it falls right out.
Peel back the sticky loom tape and you'll find a violet-white wire and a few brown-black wires. The violet wire is a fused switched +12v (ignition position 1) and the brown-black wires are earths. This is part of the rain/light sensor, I'm unsure of how it'll be for the convertible or M.
See here for wiring diagrams:
http://wds.spaghetticoder.org/en/svg/sp/SP0000023762.svg?m=e8385
Soldered into the the loom
I decided to use spade connectors so I could remove it without having to de-solder.
Make sure you connect to the correct + / - and don't short the wires!
Or you end up with this
:http://www.z4-forum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=33711
Trial fitment, you can see it's not particularly obtrusive to the drivers view:
View from outside:
The yellow light is a reflection of the camera flash don't worry
Job done
Hope this comes in handy if anyone else is looking at doing the same
But if a crash was my fault I'd like to think I'd admit it 
