I’ve looked into helmet cams since I had an accident that cost me a tooth (sideswiped by another cyclist). It seems that most of them only have about 2 or so hours of record time on a charge. That doesn’t seem sufficient. Don’t need the additional lights, though.
"2 or so hours of record time on a charge. That doesn’t seem sufficient."
I'm not sure why the blackbox style of camera hasn't caught on more. (like eg http://www.rideye.com/, but I'm sure there are others).
My rides are commonly 100miles plus at a time - slowly -
and often overnight. Not only is that too long for the camera at decent resolution, it's too long for batteries; last time I tried that, a GoPro with a 32Gb card that might've taken 8h of video died after 4h. A 5 min rolling window of decent resolution footage is all I want for crashes or highlights.
But more than this, it'd be nice to have some standardisation on bike accessories running off a single power bus, not their individual batteries. My dynamo gear is great (I use a SON hub, Edelux 2, and a Secula rear) but why was this not semi-standard; I'm in northern europe and lights are needed most of the year. And once the cabling is there, why aren't bike gadgets aimed at bus power rather than more and more batteries?
Based on the information provided, it is NOT plug-and-play; you must manually adjust voltage and current for your device, and if it's not amenable to voltage sags/stoppages, you have to add a buffer battery.
Battery life is definitely a challenge. At CES last year I saw a big brand demonstrating an action camera for bikes and it was also around 2h life. I just laughed at them. My bike trips usually consist of 5-6 hours of riding each day, and it's not always convenient to recharge overnight on multi-day treks.
Do you have any evidence to support the “extreme outlier” assertion, speaking as someone in a large bike club who regularly does long rides.
I understand most commutes are under 3 miles but I think many serious club riders would ride between 50-100 miles in a single ride most weekends (might be stops for coffee and cake along the way :).
Sadly, we get close passed and threatened every week it seems.
The Fly 12 (front model of the rear Fly 6 mentioned in the article) has 8+ hours of recording time and with a small memory card only keeps the last two hours (discarding older video), also, less video time if used as light.
Since you're on a bicycle, you should be able mount a reasonably sized battery on the bike to keep it charged? Any common usb phone battery bank should work fine
I have a dynamo hub that could recharge it on the fly, with a USB adapter. It would mean wiring it to the handlebar, but I suppose I could live with that.
