sex aid in the glove box....batteries failing.

9 minutes???

Is this thread anything to do with the new X FILES series ????

Thanks for all your suggestions and ideas, bizarre though some of them have been!

 

I'm sure  you'll be relieved to know that I have now identified the source of the sound - and I'm afraid it's not air bases, more to the point it's nothing to do with the car itself.

 

Rather embarrassingly, I had forgotten about my dashcam.  Actually it's not so embarrassing, because it's tucked neatly up behind the mirror out of sight of the driver, as it should be.  Anyway, it appears that it is the dashcam which is making the chime, apparently to warn me that it is about to switch itself off.

 

The dashcam is powered from an ignition live circuit, so it switches on and starts recording video automatically when I turn the ignition on, and it should shut down gracefully when I turn the ignition off.  It had been behaving that way perfectly nicely since I installed it in December last year. It's not clear why it has suddenly taken to turning itself off mid-journey, nor why it is doing so after nine minutes (confirmed by the duration of the video it has managed to record on each journey).

 

It's all very puzzling, but at least I can rest assured that the car isn't trying to tell me that it's about to break down, or anything dramatic and expensive like that.

A www bottoms!

I thought we were onto aliens)))))

I've had occasional minor problems with my dashcam not quite the same scenario (it stops recording when full instead of looping and deleting oldest files to make room for new ones) but anyway, I've found that if from time to time I remove the SD card and format it on my laptop everything is fine again. I suppose that it would be sods law if anything happened so it rather devalues the point of having the camera at all - I really must look into it - one day .

I've had occasional minor problems with my dashcam not quite the same scenario (it stops recording when full instead of looping and deleting oldest files to make room for new ones) but anyway, I've found that if from time to time I remove the SD card and format it on my laptop everything is fine again. I suppose that it would be sods law if anything happened so it rather devalues the point of having the camera at all - I really must look into it - one day .

 

Agreed: if the thing can't be relied on to work, it can't be relied upon for evidence.

 

From reading around on the dashcam forums it appears that the one I have can be very picky about the SD card used.  I reformatted the current SD card in the dashcam this morning before setting out and it did the 9-minute shutdown again.  I powered it up again manually and it seemed to work OK for the rest of the journey.

 

It looks like there might be a bad sector on the SD card which the dashcam isn't handling elegantly, so it records three three-minute segments of video, then chokes on the bad sector when trying to create the next video file.  I'll try a full reformat of the SD card on the PC and see if that makes the dashcam any happier.  Otherwise it might have to be a replacement SD card - or a replacement dashcam, if the seller will accept a return after two months...

 

Oh, and those who said that it was a triple beep: you're right, and that's the name by which the fault is referred to on the dashcam forum.

 

(On reflection, I think aliens would have been more exciting!)

Edited 11 February, 201610 yr by ejstubbs