So, you know how you never seem to have a camera running when something crazy or cool
happens right before your eyes? Well, a company called Innov reached out to us and said, “hey,
we love what you are doing, we’d like to send you a dash-cam” Which was immediately
really interesting. First, I don’t especially like running a
GoPro all the time. It just turns into thousands of hours of footage that I have to wade through,
but at the same time, I’m constantly trying to get shots of things we riders have to deal
with on a regular basis. A dash-cam that is always recording would be slick, but Innov
has a really cool extra feature that I’ll get to in a minute.
When I first opened the box, I was immediately impressed. The whole thing really exudes quality!
It has two camera’s running simultaneously. The front camera shoots 4k and the back camera
shoots traditional 1080. So the problem with these jobs is always,
basically, where do you put the thing. And I think the problem is going to be made a
little harder with this because the front camera is also, basically, the head unit.
It has the "hard-drive" in there. And it has all these pig-tails coming off of it. That
kinda' prevents me from putting it on the handlebars or anyplace kind of in the cockpit,
because I'll have this mess of wires coming off of it.
I'm thinking I'm going to have to put it somewhere on the front of the bike. The challenge of
that is, even though these things are waterproof, there is a practical limit to how much water
these things can kind of endure. I'm thinking I have two choices. Either underneath the
beak or underneath the headlight. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to take the whole front
of the bike apart to figure out which mounting point is actually going to be more practical.
So even in MotoGP, Ducati is always got a lot of criticism because while most race bikes,
they try to use one size nut for everything. But Ducati is like "No, no. We know more than
you. We're going to use three different bolt sizes on everything." So you always have to
carry multiple wrenches with you and remember which size goes where. Because, Ducati knows
more than you. And honestly, it's been so long since I've
taken this bike apart, I can barely remember what sequence things come apart in. But since
I'm going to have to wrap the cables over the tank, or around the tank... And I'm definitely
going to have to take the nose off, I'm pretty certain that the tank cover is going to have
come off as well. So... cue time lapse...
Alright so this definitely clears up my two choices. The first one being underneath the
headlights. Which, while I think a better overall location. I don't think there is a
good way to mount it there. The big bundle of wires is totally in the way. And there
isn't a whole lot of room for this big mass of wiring. It would have to stick out pretty
far, I think. And that's just not going to do. And there is still the whole issue of
attaching to the bottom of the glass headlight. So that, I think, means that I'm going to
have to go with plan B. Or, basically, plan A. I think the bottom of the nose is going
to be the better location. So, this is the bottom tray of the beak. The air intake comes
in on this side. This side is basically a blank. It goes primarilly just to the oil
cooler. But on the bottom, I have this nice flat spot,
right here. And you can see that the bottom of this has this mounting bolt. And I think
attaching it right there is going to be my best option. The unfortunate thing is, there
are these little drain holes, here for water. I think I'm going to have to open up one of
these drain holes and run the wiring in that way to get it up behind the bodywork for attaching
to anything. I guess the biggest worry with this mounting
location is then the; how much water is it going to be exposed to. So, I mean, I don't
like riding in the water. In fact, I go to great lenghts to not ride in the rain, but
invariably, I and up riding in the rain a lot. Especially for someone who hates riding
in the wet. So, I guess, thats kinda' what we're stuck with.
Alright, so lets see what we've got. Rubbery things. A spacer. So, Innovv's little bracket;
they have a couple of different versions depending on if you are going to mount horizontally
or vertical. In this case, the U-bracket goes onto the top of the camera and then you get
this aluminum thing that goes in the middle, that will give us some kind of adjustment.
We'll be able to rotate, pan and tilt and zoom.
So, on the bottom of my air scoop, the nose, the beak... The length and the size of everything
seems almost perfect. It mounts right to that flat spot, right there. The distance is pretty
perfect. Plus, you know, I get some adjustability. Hopefully they made this really watertight
because It's gonna' get wet. You probably can't see this, but, I've marked
the center position, roughly where I want it to go. And now the scary part; to drill
a hole in a piece of italian plastic. So something I didn't actually consider until
just now. We have about five inches of travel and four inches of clearance before I hit
the camera. So I don't know if that's going to work. Which is kind of a shame after going
to all that trouble. Maybe if I suck it up all the way, get it as tight as it can go
to the bottom of the thing. Thats four and half inches. Do I use all of my travel? Not
all the time, but I do sometimes. I mean, thats kind of the point of having travel.
So I've nestled the camera really tight under the bottom of the beak. I couldn't use any
of the bracketry just because it made the camera sit too low. If it was too low, potentially,
it would hit the fender under hard braking. I just nestle it up in there. I think, looking
at it from the front, we're clearing any of the bodywork. And from a distance, I think
thats going to be a pretty gosh-darn subtle placement.
Alright so I've removed the gas tank panel. All the wires are coming up here here. We're
going to have to snake them, because they are going to be awfully close to those oil
lines, around to get to the battery. The control module has to the handlebars at some point.
The rear camera heads back this way somewhere. Haven't take any of this stuff off yet.
The cool thing, this thing comes with a microphone. Which I think you could use either for vlogging,
which I'm not going to do that. But it would be really nice to get good nice engine sounds
without the wind. So, I think I'm going to nestle the microphone in the tail section
because I think that will reduce the wind noise and we'll just be able to hear the motor.
Let's see how that goes? The nice thing about these, is they, uh, they
tend to all be color-coordinated and they only fit in one place. This one goes here.
And they thread-lock on to make sure they don't come unplugged. Now the other question
you have to ask yourself is what happens when you take your bike in for service? The tech
starts taking your bike apart and is like "what the hell are all these wires?" There
is a down side to everything. Now, next we have the actual GPS module.
And you think these are just going to be simple project and you end up taking the whole fricking
motorcycle apart. When fully installed, it’s pretty tidy.
The front camera is nestled up under the nose, not really very noticeable, and the rear camera
is nestled right here by the rear turn signal. To get the most out of the camera’s you
need to install their app, but it allows you to see the camera real-time to verify they
are pointed the right direction, gain access to all your footage, play or download your
footage to your phone. So, the cool feature that really excited me
about the Innov is this little button. Basically, anytime you see something cool, all you do
is “push the button” and it moves the current file into a protected folder. Cool
scenery, push the button, Animals on the road, push the button. A car pulls out in front
of you, Push the button. The problem is, these are big files so downloading
from the camera to your phone using wifi takes a bit of time, time when your motorcycle ignition
has to be on, so if you are moving a bunch of files it takes its toll on the bike's battery.
So I’ve found that it’s faster to pull the SD card. Which is hidden behind this small
panel. One of my complaints is that it uses two itty-bitty flat-head screws, which are
easy to drop and easy to use. I wish they were torx, and I wonder how waterproof this
metal panel is? So, along with water, I was also really worried
about damage, especially to the front camera. I think it would probably be better placed
in the cockpit behind a clear windscreen, but that doesn’t really matter because I
don’t have a clear windscreen. The best place I could figure to put the front camera
puts it out in harm's way. But after a few thousand miles, you have to
remember to clean bugs off the lens at basically every stop, but I already have a little rock
chip in the lens. So, I think this needs some sort of replaceable lens cover. At the very
least, I’m going to try to install some sort of clear-bra protection over the lens.
The video footage is really good, the audio, so far, isn’t amazing. I think that’s
probably due to my microphone placement. I’m still playing with microphone locations to
get good natural sound, Overall I’m extremely impressed with the
Innov K5. If you commute and deal with traffic, having front and rear cameras constantly recording
could make all the difference in a situation where your insurance company is involved.
But even in my specific use case, it’s fantastic. If anything comes up that I can use in a video,
I can just push the button. I’ve put links in the description of the
video where you can learn more. I’ve also put a link to our website where I’ll post
updates regarding how well this holds up in the long term. Thank you to Innov for sending
us a sample to test out, Thanks to all’yall for watching. Ride well.