I was thinking of buying an unlimited data plan and using an old phone to record around my car through an app.
Problem is the power source, how big of a battery do I need to keep in my car?
Like… can I just use one of the regular travel chargers and like switch it out wit another daily or? Would it last a day?
Like how big does it have to be for a week then?
Wait do you want to have some sort of security camera when not using the car or more something to record when driving?
Do you want to stream the camera with the phone? If so that’ll take quite a bit more power than you’re expecting.
If you want to record when the car is sitting idle, I wouldn’t connect it to the car directly as you’ll probably drain the battery (the capacity of those isn’t huge and I bet you’d drain it enough in <10h)
If you want the phone to be able to record and stream over 2G / 4G for a full week, I would do the following:
Fully charge the phone, turn off the WiFi, set the app to start the stream, and make it look outside a window. Then check in every hour to see when the battery ran out.
Once you know it take X hours to drain the battery, look up your phone battery capacity (ideally in WH to get an accurate result, but mAh is fine), and then you can do the math:
There’s 24*7= 168h in a week You need capacity for 168/X hours (the time it took to drain the battery) Multiply by your capacity C
So in the end you’ll need a power bank that has at least 168/X*C Wh.
If you only have the mAh rating it’s a bit more math, happy to help with infos if you need it.
Ya I want to be able to view stuff remotely. Obviously not 24/7 but like…yeah I want to be able to check the feed when I get a notif about activity around the car.
I will have to buy an (I’m assuming) unlimited data plan for this first. Then I will put that sim card into my old phone.
Also it gets pretty hot here during the summer so idk how that’ll work.
Maybe I’m best off buying some expensive dash cam that can record while the car is idle, but I’m worried it’ll get stolen cause people here steal a lot.
A phone is easier to resell than a dashcam I’d say, so maybe that’s better.
Also indeed heat inside the car could be a huge problem depending on where you live and if you have access to a shaded parking.
For a 1st test you could simply record the camera without streaming with the app and see how long that goes.