Review my issue above in the thread. Yes, I disgorged the circuit boards in the camera and soldered in a new button sized battery and voila, the thing works again. Of course, my camera had the $400 external long-charge-holding battery attached which made no difference when the button battery went south. I emailed Thinkware and requested they send me at no cost a front-rear camera ensemble that doesn’t require disassembly periodic maintenance, to replace my $800 system. I haven’t heard back.
Thanks, but we've already done that. The incident a few months ago was right after we got the car and we were trying to figure out what was wrong with the ThinkWare DVR, hence the recent format and FW update. We had just purchased the car which had it pre-installed.
Yes, it works fine now, but that doesn't change the fact that it didn't when we needed it (prowler in our driveway, peeking in our cars right after breaking into a neighbor's car) and there is no good engineering reason why. That's why I will never buy another ThinkWare and will advocate against it.
My previous post was specifically to point out that the date problem also prevents people motivated to comb through the footage when something serious enough warrants it. The files are gone and even professional data recovery is unlikely due to writing over them.
It's ridiculous that these things completely fail at their intended purpose just because the date is wrong, especially when the correct date can be reacquired by GPS and maintained without GPS as long as there is power. Even if it lost power it should be able to detect that and turn on GPS long enough to reacquire or at least make undated sequential recordings during the condition where the time/date was not known.
The next BIG concern is that they would market this for permanent installation in vehicles with a ticking time-bomb that essentially ruins the product after only three years (earliest reports were about three years after the product was announced). There was plenty of room for a larger battery and even a non-rechargeable could've easily outlasted that.
For an example that should set consumer expectations, look at all the Pokémon Game Boy Advance games that used a battery for a real-time clock (RTC). They died faster than the older games that used a larger battery for saving game progress to SRAM, but they still lasted several years and weren't even full-size 20mm batteries. The one used by ThinkWare is laughably small in comparison and somehow has a shorter useful life DESPITE being rechargeable (Pokemon's RTC battery is not).
Many laptops use a non-rechargeable coin cell battery for maintaining their clock and CMOS settings and they don't even have to fit into space constraints on the circuit board (often attached with leads/wires and a disconnect). Again, they last several years at least. My Toshiba Libretto CT110 ultraportable laptop from the '90s has a tiny little one that still works, and they actually bothered to attach the wire leads with a disconnect.
A car that is being operated or maintained frequently enough that the starter battery and fuel doesn't go bad should be fine with having no RTC battery in the integrated GPS-aware DVR system. Heck, even if they had to have some on-board power source specifically for the DVR RTC, a simple capacitor could do it... recharges everytime it sees power and lasts weeks with no battery needed.
Capacitors are often used as a cheaper substitute for a battery in situations where you might need to maintain time/date or other electronic settings when main power is removed. The only reason a vehicle's clock doesn't always have a capacitor like that is because it isn't as critical for basic vehicle functions as it is for a DVR's functions, which brings us right back to their basic engineering failures considering the device's application.
But their shame doesn't end there. Not only have they not remedied it with a firmware update, they won't even properly acknowledge it, seemingly even working to undermine people looking for a solution. Users searching for the date issue will find a "How to set time/date" tutorial which doesn't address it at all- heck, it doesn't even address what the guide presumes to explain (setting time/date)! It ignores the premise and title of their video and shows you how to change the time ZONE, never even mentioning that time/date is set automatically by GPS, confusing users even more. You might triple-check that the time/date option they imply is there, isn't, then wrongly conclude that something is wrong with your browser, wireless device, etc suppressing the option.
This is something this FW engineers could literally fix overnight. The fact that they still haven't as more and more users inevitably experience this speaks volumes about how serious they take critical issues like BEING FUNCTIONAL. I seriously hope they see people reacting this way and reverse course before it completely ruins their company but, as it stands now, they deserve it.