Skip to main content

Do this simple mod to your OEM Droid dock, take police style car camera footage.

You see the craziest things driving down the road in Vermont. The other day I was driving over a mountain in a snow storm, and thought about how now one would believe what I was going through unless I had some video. Unfortunately, the last thing I was going to do was try to hold a camera while driving, rally-style, through heavy snow.

I glared at my Droid, perched in the perfect position to record the view out the front windshield. All I would need to do was hit the camera button, and hit record! But alas, the Droid dock has no hole in the back for the camera to see through. I vowed that day that I would take the 5 minutes to drill the stupid thing, and easily open up a whole new world of hands-free video footage.





Drill Template

Since I figured I'd have one shot at it, I decided to make a template first. I measured everything out with my vernier calipers, drew up a template and printed it out. The template is designed so it can be cut and laid into the dock. I then drilled straight through spot where the camera will end up.

Tools

Here's what you'll need if you want to do this as well:
  • Printout of my template
  • Drill
  • Some scotch tape
  • A 5/16" drill bit
  • A file to "deburr" (smooth) the edges of the hole.
Fasten the template to the face of the dock where your Droid would go.

Start by drilling as straight as you can through the circle. It's kind of an awkward piece to drill through. It's not the end of the world if the drill slips a little at the end. If necessary, remove the template and then use the drill like an end mill to stretch the right side (in landscape) of the hole a little. Place the Droid in the dock in camera mode, and tweak the hole as needed to make sure there is no obstruction.

Some Caveats

1. You could weaken the mount and cause one of the corners to break off. This might not be the mod for you if you frequently throw your Droid dock in a bag or suitcase, and travel around with it. For me, it really just stays in the car, so I'm not too worried about it breaking.

2. I should point out that this solution will work better for you if you have mounted the Droid dock to the dashboard, rather than the windshield. The arm is more likely to articulate such that it doesn't block (or partially block) the camera. It's still not bad, though.

That's It!

Now drive around town and pretend you are on COPS! But keep your eyes on the road, or you might actually end up on COPS.





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux.  Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind.  For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS.  With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment.  It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* f...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

 I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks).  It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc.  But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin.  To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin...
Post a Comment
Read more

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server ...
Post a Comment
Read more