This Raspberry Pi dashcam continuously records even when your car is off

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This DIY system adds Pi-powered peace of mind.

Raspberry Pi
(Image credit: Fishwithadeagle)

When it comes to security, you can't go wrong with covering all of your bases. That's why we appreciate this project put together by maker and developer Fishwithadeagle, who's created an impressive Raspberry Pi dashcam system. Not only does it help record while you drive, but it also keeps recording when you stop and the vehicle isn't powered on. This means you're covered with a watchful eye even if you aren't around.

Fishwithadeagle built the whole system from scratch with a few features that make it really stand out against commercial dashcams you can buy on the market, at a much lower price. In addition to continuously recording, it has an impressively high battery life of 38 hours, infrared support, and the ability recharge the batteries quickly.

Dashcam systems that offer features like this can cost upward of $700 and even $900 USD. However, Fishwithadeagle managed to put this together for just $550. It records using multiple cameras, providing four separate streams — two of which offer 1080p quality at 30 FPS while the other two have a resolution of 2592x1944 at 12 FPS. All the cameras are hosted through a singular Pi, meaning you have one point of contact for monitoring them.

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Raspberry Pi
(Image credit: Fishwithadeagle)

The main board powering the system is an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5. It's powered by two rechargeable LiFePo4 batteries with a 190 Whr rating. A 256GB microSD card takes care of storage, which is necessary for capturing so much video. Fishwithadeagle confirmed that two Logitech c930e webcams are used alongside a couple of J5 Create 360 webcams. Those four cameras constitute the majority of the price. The hardware was mounted using various 3D components that Fishwithadeagle designed and printed for this project.

Unfortunately, Fishwithadeagle has yet to provide the source code used in the project, so we aren't exactly sure how everything communicates. However, he did offer to share the code with anyone interested in how the project works, confirming that there are five scripts that are used. Be sure to follow him for future updates as well as a tutorial breaking down further how the project was assembled.

If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, you can check out the project thread shared to Reddit.

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Ash Hill
Ash Hill
Contributing Writer

Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • kyzarvs
    I looked at this a couple of years ago. Despite the article, mainstream stuff on Amazon is a lot cheaper - certainly under £150 if you just want offline recording and front/rear internal cameras.

    The other issue is that decent external cameras (my project was to record trackdays, so a camera low down in the front bumper and a rear-facing one on the rear wing added drama lol) are all composite and not digital, which added encoding workload to the pi. Getting 2x composite feeds + 1/2 digital feeds for inside the car + GPS trace started getting insanely difficult and expensive. I ended up with a motorbike (weatherproof) kit that did it all with wifi, remote control etc for about £250
    Reply
  • KyaraM
    Sounds like a privacy laws violation to me.
    Reply
  • edzieba
    The big killer with these systems is that numberplate legibility is a foundational requirement, and very hard to achieve in practice for the range of normal lighting conditions encountered. e.g. the same camera needs to be able to have a plate legible in direct head-on sunlight, direct behind-camera sunlight (important for plates that are retroreflective) in the dead of night (both streetlight-dominated and headlight-dominated) and at various angles relative to the camera.

    This is where cheap dashcams really start to fall over. One option with the Raspi version would be to add a dedicated nIR camera with its own illumination solely for ANPR logging, so the visible-light camera can balance and expose for scene legibility - as it can do easily and by default - with numberplates still captured.
    Reply
  • kyzarvs
    edzieba said:
    The big killer with these systems is that numberplate legibility is a foundational requirement, and very hard to achieve in practice for the range of normal lighting conditions encountered. e.g. the same camera needs to be able to have a plate legible in direct head-on sunlight, direct behind-camera sunlight (important for plates that are retroreflective) in the dead of night (both streetlight-dominated and headlight-dominated) and at various angles relative to the camera.

    This is where cheap dashcams really start to fall over. One option with the Raspi version would be to add a dedicated nIR camera with its own illumination solely for ANPR logging, so the visible-light camera can balance and expose for scene legibility - as it can do easily and by default - with numberplates still captured.
    For in-car cameras, I completely agree with you - I've had several and there's always an issue with legibility.

    For my current setup though with weatherproof composite cameras from a motorbike kit, a useful side effect of the cameras actually being at the front / rear of the vehicle (as opposed to in the passenger compartment in the middle) is that number plates are much more recognisable. Also choosing the right FoV width really helps - fitting say 90 degrees into a 2560 wide image is much easier than 140
    Reply