Importing Mini 0806 dashcam - anyone want one?

A

Arthur

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I'm having a bout of NewVersionosis and plan to get the latest Mini 0806 dashcam from the manufacturer in China. Have previously used the Mini 0801 and Mini 0803 and been very happy with the performance for the relatively low price. I was persuaded by Techmoan's review. One issue with the Mini 0803: it gets hot and is not ideal for a climate like SA's.

Well, the Mini 0806 apparently fixes the overheating issues and brings some enhancements which you can read about on the Dashcamtalk forum here. Found another write-up here.

I'm not in this business and my previous imports have been purely private, for family and friends. But given the interest here I've decided to offer MyBBers a chance to piggyback on my next order, which will be on Tuesday 13 Jan 2015.

The manufacturer has quoted me $80 per cam (GPS version), plus $5 for the CPF (circular polarising filter), so $85 FOB per unit (drops to $83 per unit on qty >20).

I do not plan to mark up or make a profit in any way. Simple cost recovery.

Still unknown are airfreight/shipping from China and ZA Customs VAT/handling, but I anticipate the following additional costs:

Shipping to SA: $8 per unit (courier, delivery within one week of dispatch ex factory)
ZA Customs VAT: 14% on 110% of invoice value: $13.09
Local handling by courier: R35 per unit (might be less, depending on qty ordered)
Local delivery by courier to your address: R100 item

The US$ commercial sell rate is currently around 11.80 (see here) on a credit card, so I'll work on that for currency.

Expected unit cost breakdown in ZAR:
* Mini 0806 GPS with CPF : $85 = R1003 FOB
* ZA Customs VAT : $13.09 = R154.46
* ZA handling (charged by DHL) : R35 per unit
* Local courier to SA address : R100
TOTAL COST : R1292.46

Of course I can't give the exact final price at this stage, so work on R1400 delivered to you. I'll let you know the final cost per unit once they're in hand, and if less will let you know.

Needless to say this is an entirely private deal, voetstoots, no local warranty, etc. I reiterate, this is entirely private, I make zero profit. Full risk on you once the items is couriered to you.

Interested? PM me. I'll need a firm commitment. As I said, this is a purely private thing for personal use, not a business.

Here's an unboxing video by the manufacturer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd9kwVApKHo

IMG_8108.jpg
 
you might be in for additional import duties, however, I'm in for 1
 
Won't you need an importer's number? Could possibly run into trouble...
 
I am interested.

The one I have now freezes all the time, especially when it gets hot.

Edit : Make that 2 units.
 
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Very odd mounting method? Is that 2 way tape? No suction mount? Will be a problem to remove it.
 
If you need an importers number, pm me, I have one and am vat registered.

Would be interested in manufacturers details, as I'm in China, and could get one from them directly fairly easily (I return on the 28th back to Cape Town). Took a quick look through the thread but didn't see them listed, and a cursory check on taobao didn't find them either.

[Never mind, seems to be the using the 安霸A7 SoC, I think I've found a couple of the factories making them]

My luggage is fairly full though with LED lights otherwise I could bring back myself.
Redoing the house with LED Filament bulbs now, 4w,6w filament - quite nice light compared to the standard old style LED bulbs. Bit $$ compared to normal LED's as they're 2-3 times the price, but still waaaaay cheaper than .za
 
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Thanks, Lawrence. I have a personal Importer's Number, and have been through this quite a few times before. I brought in a crate of Mini 0803s in June last year.
 
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tRoN said:
Very odd mounting method? Is that 2 way tape? No suction mount? Will be a problem to remove it.
Click to expand...
I've tried many dashcams and can see the sense of this one. The small mount (which includes GPS and power cable) sticks in situ and the camera is easily removed without need to disconnect cable.

I have the previous 0803 on all my cars.
 
The Mini 0806 would actually work very nicely as an action camera if one could add some water proofing and an external power source.
It's the only camera I've seen so far that can officially record up to 256GB (2*128GB cards).
GoPro sucks in this area as they provide no official support above 64GB cards and there are issues with long recording times (max 64 files per video clip).

I'm thinking of remote or inaccessible locations were you start the recording and then retrieve the camera after 10 hours and edit in post.
1296p (2304*1296px 30fps)looks like just about the right resolution for image stabilization and defishing before cropping to 1080p.
 
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lsheed_cn said:
Never mind, seems to be the using the 安霸A7 SoC, I think I've found a couple of the factories making them
Click to expand...

There are two versions.
The Mini 0803 used a A7LA50D SoC with AR0330 3MP image sensor.
The Mini 0805 and 0806 use a different A7LA50 and Omnivision OV4689 4MP sensor.

So both the SoC chipsets and sensors are different.
http://www.mini0806.com/spec.html
 
Definitely would like one please. Can the cam be hardwired in the car?
 
@paul_s i'm actually quite conversant with that sort of thing, i used to write ip camera firmware once upon a time :)

Done a lot of embedded dev stuff over the years..
 
Looks like there are even better solutions around the corner although probably more expensive:

Ambarella, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMBA), a leading developer of low-power, HD and Ultra HD video processing semiconductors, today introduced the H1 camera System-On-Chip (SoC) for a new generation of sports and quadcopter cameras (flying cameras). The Ambarella H1 supports 4K Ultra HD H.264 video encoding at 60 frames per second for high-speed live-action recording with smooth slow-motion capabilities. It also supports the new H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) video standard for 4K Ultra HD encoding at up to 30 frames per second, providing higher image quality at lower bitrates as well as faster video uploads and higher resolution video streaming.
Click to expand...

http://www.businesswire.com/news/ho...a-H1-Camera-SoC-Doubles-Ultra-HD#.VLKjm9KUdqF

It will probably take another year for this SoC to make it's way into products so for the moment the Mini 0806 is pretty much about as good as it gets with regards to good video quality at a really low price point.
 
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Problem with a lot of the SoC's is that they don't have good dev kits / api material.
Its usually highly targeted to a specific linux or android version, and you have tons of issues patching in newer kernels.
The hardware drivers are also usually binary blobs, and full of bugs.
So, its sort of irrelevant about claimed functionality when it *barely* works, or is undocumented as anything.
Haven't seen the Ambarella stuff specifically though, so can't comment on theirs.
Should probably take a sniffle, although I have way too many balls in the air at the moment, and should concentrate on finishing current projects ;)

Good thing though is that SoC functionality is leaps ahead of where I started, as is ram/storage, now a gig of ram is cheap, as is 2G of flash. No more struggling to compile stuff into a few kb! Even a mere few years ago I was doing stuff for 16M ram on kernel 2.2 on flat userspace binaries.

Mostly you can thank Acorn for all that. Archimedes -> ARM, and many years down the line they're smart and licence their cores to all and sundry. SoC manufacturers can pick and choose licencing add a graphics core, and there are enough 32nm or even 20nm factories here in China that can make chips - TSMC in Shanghai for example. Sure, its in the millions of units to be profitable, but there are enough set-top boxes, phones and other things to make money. I think that MTK may have some interesting stuff that could be used, they're quite big in the tv space and phone space, and they have h.265 / 4k encoding in their latest SoC's.
RockChip, MTK, HiSilicon and Allwinner are usually ones to watch.

eg http://www.pocketdroid.net/2014/06/02/mediatek-unveils-mt8127/

Its about 90rmb in low volumes (eg 1 unit). Bit of a high price point for a camera though, you usually want to be in the 40rmb range for cpu, so the cheaper Allwinner stuff is more popular. Prices will drop though, as competition is fast, and volumes are achieved.
I can probably find some BoM's for the camera's, and get better idea of what costs what, if I had time.

http://www.cnx-software.com/ is good for an overview of newer chipset based stuff coming out (although not necessarily based on camera stuff), if you don't read Chinese.

I'm derailing the thread a bit though ;)
 
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