Saturday, October 3, 2015

Fitting the INNOVV K1 Safety Camera to a solo R1200RT 2012 Model BMW Motorcycle.

Sharing makes riding more fun, thanks Warren from Australia, He shares below, 



After researching the WWW for a suitable safety camera to install on my BMW, the INNOVV K1 weather proof safety camera appeared to best suit my requirements; it has similar characteristics to the Itronics ITB-100HD dash cam that I have had fitted to my motor vehicle since late 2012 and is still functioning very well.
The delivery of the INNOVV K1 from China arrived at my door in less than a week and all communications with Rock at INNOVV has been prompt and positive.

I had seen illustrations of the K1 installed on other BMW’s during my research where the front camera is mounted in front of the oil cooler but this position did not appear very practical to me because it interferes with the flow of air to the oil cooler. This may not be of concern to people who ride in the cooler climates of the northern hemisphere but it becomes very critical where I ride in the land down under of South Australia (the driest State in the driest continent on earth) where we can experience some sustained extremes of temperatures during the summer months.

I decided to fit the front camera behind the electric windshield that rises and lower’s at the touch of a button meaning that it needed to be raised sufficiently so that vision would not be obscured when the windshield was in the raised position, but it also provides the camera with some protection from road grime during wet weather.


Front camera on raised bracket, K1 GPS module to the right of camera, remote button on lower left below the left grip

Top view of the front camera and bracket through the windshield

Close view of the front Camera and K1 GPS module.



The rear camera has been fitted to the right side pannier frame which enabled the cable to be fed directly into the area under the rear radio box where the power source is connected.






The recorder has been installed inside the former radio box at the rear of the motorcycle where it is protected from the weather and allows easy access by opening the locked lid of the radio box.
This is a much simpler procedure than installing it under the seat and having to remove the seat each time you want to gain access to the recorder.

The Micro SDXC card is easily removed to download images or the computer can be directly connected with the supplied USB cable


The position of the recorder in the radio box protected from the weather.



Power for the K1 was obtained by connecting to the rear power socket that is supplied from the secondary battery and that I have passed through a waterproof on/off switch that I fitted on the opposite side to the power socket.

The area under the radio box where I connected the power, using the sockets supplied.

The camera on/off switch, with the radio box lid partly open.
The labels are not visible when the lid is closed

View of Switch, rear camera and bracket



The problems encountered during installation

Fitting the cameras
The first problem I had was finding a supplier that had ¼ inch UNC bolts to secure the cameras. When I finally found them the shortest that I could obtain were ½ inch long, which were too long to tighten the cameras to the brackets even with the stainless steel spring washers that I was using. I got them to fit by grinding then down to the necessary size. I can understand brackets not being supplied because of the variety of methods and locations that customers will use to fit their cameras, but I think it would be a good idea of one bolt of the correct thread was supplied with each camera.
With the camera housing being aluminium and the bolts that I used being high tensile steel I coated the threads with some Duralac before tightening them. This is an anti corrosive joining compound which inhibits electrolytic corrosion between dissimilar metals. There are probably different brands available.

Channelling the cables
Channelling the cables from the front to the rear of the BMW so that they were out of harm’s way required the lowering of the left crash bar, the removal of the seat, the left side panels, and the left flashing turn indicator with fairing panel; by following the procedures contained in the Riders Manual.
This facilitated the channelling of the cables from the front camera and K1 GPS module down through the top of the fairing behind the windshield, and then together with the cable from the remote button (all taped together at 10cm intervals) under the fuel tank and clear of the motor, along the left side frame to the rear. The 2 metre length of cabling from the camera and the GPS module was just sufficient to meet up with where I wanted to mount the recorder in the rear radio box.

Power supply
My BMW is fitted with a secondary battery which feeds directly to the rear power socket, independent of the CANbus electrical system, and was used for supplying power to radios. Unlike the standard connection where the power to this power socket is active when the ignition is turned on and becomes inactive two minutes after the ignition is switched off, which would have made it ideal to source the power for the K1, the power to my power socket is constantly active.

I intended to get around this by connecting to this power source and passing it through a 12V Relay which would be activated by power from the tail light that becomes active as soon as the ignition is turned on and inactive when the ignition is switch off.  Simple as it sounds and would work in the majority of cases, it did not work on the BMW.

I started fault finding using my multimeter and found that I was getting 12V from the power socket but less than 3V from the connection to the tail light, which was insufficient power to trigger the 12V Relay.
Nothing wrong with the connections I had made, the problem was caused by a BMW method of providing both the tail light and stop light by way of a single filament globe, where only a low voltage power is provided to power the tail light and then that power is boosted to the same filament when the brake is applied to brighten the globe.

The solution was to discard the Relay and to pass the power from the power socket through an on/off switch, because as a novice I was not prepared to tap into the CANbus system to find another ignition source and risk causing costly damage to the electrical system as has happened to some people.

I have read about another customer using the PDM60 (Power Distribution Module that can accommodate up to six additional components) to avoid this danger but I could not justify the additional cost to power just one addition component.

Some things to be aware of.
When configuring your settings on the K1 recorder, be aware that in addition to setting your local time you must also set the GPS Time Zone for your area. This is most important if you have your GPS connected to your recorder. If you fail to set the GPS Time Zone, as I did, you will find that most of your video files will be filed out of order. The reason for this is that until your GPS makes contact with the satellites your recorder will record the time as per your local time settings, but when the GPS has made contact with the satellites the recorder will record times as per the Time Zone that it set.

By way of example, Australian Central standard time zone is +9½ hours and the default time zone in the recorder is + 4 hours.  So the time stamp on the video files recorded after the GPS kicked-in was 5½ earlier than the actual time that I was riding.

One shortfall that I have noticed with the K1 Recorder is that Time Zones can only be adjusted to the nearest hour. Because of this, Time Zones that are at 30 minutes intervals like mine will always have their time stamp showing incorrect times of 30 minutes. I think that this is something that needs to be attended to when the software is updated. It is a feature that is available on all of my Garmin devices and should not be difficult to correct.

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