I will say it’s quite a bit more expensive than a typical off-the-shelf consumer dash-cam, since you’re essentially just installing a full-blown computer. I use a Raspberry Pi 5 for the pre-made kits, which is able to record 30fps@720p across two channels (front/rear). It’ll work with just about any USB webcam. The tricky part for new users is that you typically have to create a 12V to 5V USB harness to power it from the car.
This is a bit of self promotion, but I built an entirely open-source dash-cam that excels in this scenario. Instead of recording to an SD card inside the camera, the camera is connected to a capture device installed somewhere else in the car.
It’s not perfect, but it’s very time consuming for a potential adversary to locate the video storage. It was designed like this primarily for car break-ins, but it would work well here as well.
It all runs on a generic Linux SBC, so there’s technically nothing stopping you from encrypting the SD card too.
The cat is a bit out of the bag on that one.
Predator has been several years in the making at this point, but I’ve been trying to balance limiting mass surveillance while still having a product that’s compelling enough for people to be willing to give up the traditional mass surveillance methods.
As far as the data import utility goes, that component is still private while I figure out how to handle it.
You’re bringing up many of the points I regularly consider working on this project. It boils down to the fact that this technology is widespread, and will continue to be widespread regardless of my actions. The catalyst for starting this project was when I learned what Flock ALPR cameras looked like, and noticed how widespread they were. I wanted to build something that could replace them without compromising privacy.
It’s difficult, since there’s an argument to be made for both sides. I’d argue that the existence of Predator gives an alternative to to invasive products like Flock ALPR. But at the same time, I think it’d be great to live in a world where this technology required warrants, transparency, and other oversight from the start.
Regarding the name, Predator seems to be a bit of a point of contention. As a point of clarification, Predator does way more than just ALPR. It’s a fully featured dash-cam with object recognition, deep vehicle integration, and more. In nature, predators often have sharp vision and quick reflexes, which was the main motivation. It also opens up some clever branding options. For example “Predator Apex” is the commercial side of Predator, and each preassembled product is named after a predator (Scorpion, Owl, Falcon, etc.) Additionally, other brands in the automotive/law enforcement space tend to have rather sharp sounding names as well (“Cobra”, “Dragon Eye”, “Stalker”, etc.)
It might, but the Pi 5 has pretty strict power requirements. The official specs reccomend 5V5A, while most 12V adapaters supply 5V2.4A (or 5V1A for the cheap ones). It’ll generally work, but customers often experience strange behavior with questionable power supplies.
Mounting the camera isn’t terribly difficult. A significant portion of USB cameras have 1/4th inch tripod mounts, which gives you a lot of options. I personally use a little adhesive GoPro mount, with a small 1/4th inch tripod adapter. That lets you securely mount it just about anywhere with a flat surface. The camera’s cable is several meters long, which means you can mount the Pi just about anywhere. In my install you have to disassemble a significant portion of the car to get to the SD card (video is typically offloaded over LAN, which is password protected).
I will say that the Pi Zero is almost certainly insufficient for video recording. In my tests, the Pi 5 tops out at about 2 channels of 720p@30fps, while the Pi 4 struggles to encode one 480p@30fps stream. I’ve been researching SBCs better suited to video encoding, like the Nvidia Jetson, but I’m not quite ready to invest in dev kits for a non-profit project when other components of the software are much more commercially successful.