New dash cam for my FZ07
4-23-23
For the last few years I’ve been using a GoPro Hero 3 with an 8h extended battery as my dash cam on my bike. Its been great and some of the potato quality footage came out OK, but it did not like getting caught in the rain earlier this year. Since that day its refused to charge. Fair enough considering how old and used it had gotten. I didnt really want to go the gopro route again given the cost and the fact there were no good extended batteries for the modern gopros. After a bit of searching I ended up getting the Innovv K3, a 2 camera dash cam system designed for motorcycles and power sport vehicles.
The install
The first thing I did was read the somewhat minimalistic instructions and look at a few youtube videos. Some of these were very useful even though most of the “how to wire up” videos were more of a “heres what I did now look at the features of this thing”. Once I had a game plan I took everything to my bike, took off the seat, and realized most of my gameplan was not going to work so time to improvise!
I got one of those long, flexible metal hose with a retractable claw grip on one end and carefully jammed it into my bike, starting at the seat location and going towards the front. Once I made it through I would spring out the little claws, grab on to the cable, and slowly drag everything back through the body of the moto. I got to do this many time since there were 2 wires to snake to the front and I had more than one instance of doing this cabling only to realize my routing needed some adjustment up front and the best thing to do was reroute the entire cable from the beginning. This is probably the most use that metal claw thing has ever and will ever have. Mounting the rear cam was a bit easier. The cable just just snakes under the tail light and routes into the electronics box through a gap in what few body panels my FZ has.
Routing the 2 cables to the battery was also easy, but there was a third cable that connects to a switched power source. This lets the cam system know when the bike is actually on and connects to something like some of the lights. To be honest this cable was the hardest part for me mostly because I wasn’t sure what the hell they were talking about, and partially because I chose an easy looking location that turned out to not be entirely easy. I went so the little light that lights up the license plate. The light housing wasn’t made to handle this extra little wire but I made it work.
The App
The cam system connects to your phone via an app and a wifi connection. Kind of of annoying to have to manually switch my phone to this dash cam wifi network every time I want to use the app but I hope after things I set up I will rarely need to connect. The app itself is ok?
The good: You can see in what the cams are seeing (with a 1s delay), access all of the settings (only way to do this), and can see the recorded files on the SD card.
The Meh: The app has dedicated home page buttons for their rating, FAQs, and forum. Not sure how often I will use this. I’ve also encountered a few “settings changed” pop ups in not English (I’m guessing Chinese?)
The Bad: you basically have to get the app to do the initial setup. Looking back through my footage it appears like there’s a 1 hour gap where the system didn’t record. This gap started and ended when I stopped to check if the cams were still recording using the app.
First outing impression
TLDR - The quality is what I expected and my only worries are the longevity of the cams as well as worries that the cam system will drain my battery.
As you can probably tell looking at the sample footage the quality is definitively 1080potato. To be fair, there is another version of this cam system that records in 4k but it was more expensive and frankly I don’t really care. My use for a dash cam is to catch the occasionally cool thing that happens on the ride or as a way to prove who is the idiot should I every get in a wreck. I was worried the cams would shake too much given how much my FZ shakes but I am pleasantly surprised at how little shake there was. We shall see how long the cams survive not only the elements but also all this shaking.
