Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

Have been using this dash/drive cam HP f520g for a while now but one thing I didn’t like was the use of the power adaptor through the cigarette lighter socket.

Doesn’t look nice when you see a single wire hanging down from around the rear view mirror and if I want to use my mobile phone as the sat nav,
it consumes quite lot of power for the GPS and mobile data comm. so needs constant charging but the socket would be occupied by the f520g.




Thought about permanently installing USB charger but after some consideration, decided to install small power device just for the f520g and hide the cables inside the A pillar and the ceiling.

f520g uses somewhat ancient mini USB plug and not the micro one widely used on latest devices.
Before selecting the power device, checked the spec of f520g and also bench tested the current consumption under several different scenarios and confirmed that this power device has well enough power capacity.




There are several optional power supply port inside the cabin and as I have several different spare connectors, it was easy for me to connect this power device to IG2.
Being as IG2, it will reset the power while cranking the engine but if you set the power off delay on f520g as 10sec, it won’t affect the operation unless you kept cranking for more than 10sec.




Everything hidden behind the cabin panels and just short wire coming out of the ceiling.
The display will switch itself off after the specified interval and as most of the modern dash/drive cam has small appearance that you won’t notice the presence as it’s hidden behind the rear view mirror.

Hope it will survive for at least 2 years.

Kaz