imagine an app that is sort of like a panic button. You get pulled over, you open the app and hit the button which then (depending on your preferences), starts recording/streaming video and audio, locks the phone, and maybe starts recording accelerometer/gps data, etc.

It would need to be thoroughly developed/tested before actually it could be ethically recommended.

What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? unfeasible? Already existing?

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[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Cig lighter phone charger won't supply the 5v? I'd have thought the camera mount and enclosure would take the most effort. Raspberry pi zero with their camera accessory would be the main camera.

[–] cvieira@lemmy.ml 1 points 18 hours ago

It might, but the Pi 5 has pretty strict power requirements. The official specs reccomend 5V5A, while most 12V adapaters supply 5V2.4A (or 5V1A for the cheap ones). It'll generally work, but customers often experience strange behavior with questionable power supplies.

Mounting the camera isn't terribly difficult. A significant portion of USB cameras have 1/4th inch tripod mounts, which gives you a lot of options. I personally use a little adhesive GoPro mount, with a small 1/4th inch tripod adapter. That lets you securely mount it just about anywhere with a flat surface. The camera's cable is several meters long, which means you can mount the Pi just about anywhere. In my install you have to disassemble a significant portion of the car to get to the SD card (video is typically offloaded over LAN, which is password protected).

I will say that the Pi Zero is almost certainly insufficient for video recording. In my tests, the Pi 5 tops out at about 2 channels of 720p@30fps, while the Pi 4 struggles to encode one 480p@30fps stream. I've been researching SBCs better suited to video encoding, like the Nvidia Jetson, but I'm not quite ready to invest in dev kits for a non-profit project when other components of the software are much more commercially successful.