Swift maybe my way out of here

I'm a professional software engineer and have been one for 39 years, I'm not a truck driver, although I drove a bobtail with a 2spd rear end to help pay my way through college. The company I'm with specializes in the aerospace telemetry market, which is mostly satellites and high-end radar systems. Telemetry is about transmitting measurements, typically by a radio wave, cell phones are just two-way radios that you don't have to push-to-talk.

Here's one web search to try "4G LTE speed". One of the links for that is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G

There you will see that the max upload is about 500 Mbits/second. Sounds like a lot? Consider each pixel in the image, say 380x200, that's a crappy image but is 76,000 pixels.

Now consider color, say 16-bit color (do another web search on 16-bit color). Note that a 16-bit color image can't make a good-looking picture of a rose as there are only 65,535 possible colors, doesn't give you very many shades of red. So that's 1,216,000 bits for a single frame of camera image in 16-bit color. That's 1.2Mbit right there.

Now compression comes into play, do your 3rd web search on "MPEG compression ratio". It's sort of like morse code, common letters have a shorter code and long runs of the same number, say 93, can be coded to say "500 copies of 93". Here's one site: http://www.videomaker.com/article/9867-video-compression-mpeg-4

That site says 50-1 compression is still watchable, 200-1 is doable but the quality will be terrible (and can't be recovered, the information is gone).

Most cameras are at least 1MP, i.e. 1 million pixels. Put that 1 million into 16-bit color, you now have 16 Mbits to send per frame. Say 30 frames a second, that's 480 Mbits/second. Compress that at 50-1, that's 9.6Mbits.

Cell phone companies charge by the minute for voice and by the Mbit/second for data. Now consider having 200 trucks streaming this video. How much is that going to cost the company in data rates for the cell phone?

All of the above is what limits the transmission of the camera images. That doesn't mean that a trucking company can't ask the camera, at any point in time, to send its current data up to them. So your "privacy" can be "invaded" by that camera. But as for doing it all the time to all the trucks? The math don't work on that.

So before you slam IronWeasel with his 15 years of IT for "not knowing 100%" how something works, put a little thought and research onto the technology and the parts that it takes.

StoneAge Steve

 

From what you have written it seems highly unlikely that the cameras are streaming live. The next question would be how much footage can/do they store to be viewed at a ater date.

Freightwipper mentioned that he was reprimanded for using bluetooth while driving. I wonder if that was due to someone reviewing recorded footage after the truck got back to the terminal due to it being a recovery.

 

Thank you for the well written write up, I wanted to comment on this because so many people on here seem very ignorant of technology capabilities. I was going to simply say there is no way in hell a camera in a truck is going to be sending video constantly it takes way to much bandwidth to transmit video. The way I see these cameras working is they have sensors that set them off and most likely only take short 1min videos they may have a feature where they are "recording" but its deleting as it goes so say if a sensor is tripped like an accident the camera would remember the last 5minutes of video so it would show what leads up to the crash. This is already done on the PC for gamers who want to catch people cheating so a camera could easily do the same.

 

Uncompressed video takes alot of memory to save, if you read my last post I would suggest the camera "might" record as you are driving but would be deleting data as it goes because it most likely will only have a small amount of memory say 16gb of flash maybe 32gb. Depending on the resolution which I suspect would be 480P or 640x480 at 30fps It could probably have an a couple hours of data. I still think its most likely they only turn on when in an accident or a hard break which trips a sensor telling it to record. Alot of it is just going to be speculation unless you actually work for the company hired to install and run the cameras.

 

Here are some quick bullet points....

• DriveCam3 has 96MB of storage expandable to 512MB.
• Saved files average 2MB each (maximum of around 40 "events" saved) but can get up to 4 - 5MB (maximum of about 20 "events") @ 96MB.
• Saved events are stored by Lytx and available to the client for 90 days.
• There are 2 LEDs that indicate status (green, solid red, flashing red) - it won't record without you being aware of it (flashing red status).
• Records at 640x368 resolution.
• Can capture up to 1 minute per "event" but the average is 12 seconds (8 before trigger and 4 after) and is user selectable.
• Employs 3 axis (forward, vertical, & lateral) accelerometers.
• Some triggers include quick acceleration (not really an issue in tractor-trailers), hard braking or sudden deceleration due to accident, abrupt lane changes or hard cornering (lateral movement trips the accelerometers), & hard impacts while stopped (for example, someone backs into you).
• The DC3 is not capable of live streaming. It's not that the camera wouldn't be capable of it, but it's a limitation of the cellular networks and also environmental factors with the biggest being the lack of a sufficient signal or lack thereof in some areas.

Everything I've said is based on either publically available specifications for the camera or personal experience. I've driven trucks with these cameras installed and I've seen and used the software that the companies use so I have a fairly good understanding of both sides.

Anyway, the way it works is that the camera is recording as long as there is power to the vehicle and once you trigger an event, the camera will save X amount of time before the trigger and X amount of time afterwards. The default is 8 seconds before and 4 seconds after for a total of 12 seconds saved. However, the company using the camera can opt to change the setting and record more or less time per event. So while its recording all the time, it doesn't actually save and upload anything until an event is triggered so it's entirely possible to go for long periods of time without triggering an event and having that uploaded. You can also manually record as well by holding down both of the shoulder buttons so if you need to capture a license plate or if you arrived at a shipper / receiver and their gate was locked or whatever, you could record that and have it sent to your company for proof that the place really is locked up.

I understand the negativity surrounding them and the most common issue with them is that you, as a driver, feel your privacy is being violated or you feel like the camera is a way for your company to "babysit" you. I understand that your truck is your home for weeks at a time and you treat it as you would your own house and you wouldn't allow random people to put cameras up in your home so you feel that you shouldn't have them in you truck.

You're absolutely right.

Unfortunately, more and more companies are signing up to use this technology to protect themselves from frivolous lawsuits, insurance fraud, and accidents caused by driver error. The fact that it would exonerate you in some situations is a by product....they aren't nearly as interested in protecting you as they are themselves. The companies get a huge discount on their insurance premiums, they reduce the number of accidents, and they can prove invaluable in cases of insurance fraud where some dude decides he wants to intentionally be hit by you just so he can sue the company for an obscene amount of money.

 

These are the reasons I want my own truck. The automatics the no smoking rules the cameras.... this is getting retarded. Am I driving the truck or did dispatch and the ecm take over when I wasn't looking? Stick a camera in my face and watch how fast it breaks. I don't care if you put one on the road hell I have one myself. But good god almighty how bad are the drivers being cranked out these days that all these measures are even necessary?

 

Are you still trying to convince yourself ?
We have first hand reports from actual drivers of how they are being used.
The mega companies can have all the cheerleaders and engineers they want come on here and spew lies about the endless benefits of driver facing cameras but most are smart enough to call BS!

 

Not trying to convince anyone of anything.

The drivers are only 1/3 of the equation and most will likely never see the other 2/3 so they don't have an accurate picture of how they're being used. I, while sitting at my (former) managers desk, have used the DriveCam Online web portal to look at and interact with (remember, 15+ years of IT, that's why I was allowed to do it) the web portal that the end user motor carriers have access to. I know full well what that interface looks like, how it operates, and what capabilities the carrier has through that portal.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I am not nor have I ever been a cheerleader for any of the mega carriers nor am I an engineer for any of the companies I've talked about. I sit at home where I collect my severance pay and unemployment pay after I was laid off from my previous job at a regional equipment rental chain where I had just over 4 years of service. I spent 4 years hauling construction equipment, prior to that I was the oiler / fuel wagon driver for 2 years at another construction company, before that I drove for almost 2 years with Pepsi as a route driver, and the earliest trucking experience was the year I did with Swift in their OTR division and then the dedicated division for Wal-Mart out of the Los Lunas, NM DC.

As I've pointed out several times, before I got into trucking, I was in IT where I did everything from simple help desk and end user support to systems engineering and administration for large companies and government agencies. That i's where my interest in the cameras lies. I'm not trying to convince you that they're the greatest thing ever or that they have never ending benefits for the driver. I'm simply trying to eliminate misinformation about how they operate and the underlying technology and pointing out reasons why they can't work in ways that many drivers think they do. The biggest problem is that many drivers equate "camera" with "live video" and they're worried that someone will sit and watch them go about their day in real time and that can't happen due to the limitation of the cell networks. That's not me trying to convince you of anything - that is a 100% documented fact and I can provide numerous links to both the technical specifications of the DC3 and publically available whitepapers on CDMA cellular networks to include 1.x, 3G, and 4G LTE specifications that I can use to prove, beyond any speculation or hyperbole, that real time monitoring of these devices is not possible.

At this point, there really isn't much else to say unless someone else chimes in with something new. It'll just be me and you going around in circles because you think I have some ulterior motive. You think I'm secretly working for someone that has something to do with these devices and that I want drivers to actually want to have these installed. That's simply not the case - I'm just trying to educate people and clear up any misconceptions about them. I don't gain anything from anyone with these cameras...all I can do is provide documentation and relay first hand experience.

 

lol, pixels, compression, upstream capabilities blah blah blah.

If you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about.

It's for the drivers benefit, it's not for the drivers benefit.

It's for training and/or insurance purposes.

Who gives a crap about all that?

It's simple. You never know when what you are doing will be recorded. Either you accept that or you don't. It's way too Orwellian for me, but I'm not from the land of the free.

 

Swift has almost 20,000 drivers, I doubt anyone will be looking at the camera unless there's an accident and they need to see what happened.