On board camera

Finally. Spent lot's of time and effort to get onboard cam. First idea was to mount my trusty SONY TRV-250, but it's size, weight and durability put me in doubt. After browsing some auto forums, and e-bay, I found, that now new approach to on-board video exists. Digital Video Recorders (DVR). Those things are recording to memory cards, so it means no moving parts inside. They are light (also from safety point of view) and relatively cheap. So the saga has began :).

First I've got digital DVR. It's very cheap, with shipping it's about 100$. Yeah right, what you pay is what you get... The thing appeared to be purely designed by China, not a copy of some more finished product. Extremely crappy. Build quality is also scarying raw. Also missed some text in description, and haven't noticed, that it only records half of the PAL frame. That's bad. However it works.Quality is crappy, but at this point it's not so important. Next step was to get some input for this thing. Video was easy - just picked cheap lipstick camera. The sound was something more sophisticated - my DVR has no mic in, only AUDIO IN. There were two possible ways - first to get mic with amplifier (like for e-bay), or other was to use microphone capsule, and make amplifier myself. After some thinking - I made amp myself. It works suprisingly well, no matter, that it's simple as five cents. Cost of whole amp+mic (for materials), is around 5$. If you know how to solder. Here is the schematics (power supply part is omitted, because it supposed to run on batteries, but I've used 7809 and 12v directly from car battery).

Now, when all parts are working together, it's time to bring all this video lab to the garage!