Now this is an ambitious Kickstarter project. Dride is an internet connected car dashcam wth voice recognition and advanced safety features.
In the words of the creators :
Dride is our revolutionary new product built to enhance every aspect of your driving, protect you from dangerous mobile distractions, and build a community around driving smartly and safely. Dride is a dashcam, but does so much more. It comes with a real time safety alert system, navigation and voice-to-text technology. You can also build your own driving apps and make Dride as intelligent as you are. We made it possible for you to drive smart, now we need your help to share it with the world.
Take a look at their Kickstarter video to get some idea of what this product aims to do :
The idea is that you can build more apps to make the system more useful to you … although a suggest some decent testing to make sure you don’t stop the other features from working properly.
Here is a demo of the safety alerts feature :
At the time of writing the project has just launched on Kickstarter with a $100,000 target. If it turns out as well as their videos and project information suggests then car manufacturers may have to explain why they charge so much for this sort of technology.
For a lot more detail take a look at the Official Dride Kickstarter project page.
2 Comments
Their fancy video fails to show how users would need to run a USB power lead from the top, middle of the windscreen, somehow down to the power adaptor they suppy for cancerette lighter sockets … which are notoriously unreliable power sources. Otherwise I was ‘sold’. Achilles heel?
That is true but it’s no different to all other dashcams. It’s fairly easy to run a 3m USB cable (£4) along the head-lining and underneath the door pillar rubber. Once you are under the dashboard you can either use a 12V socket or plug straight into the fuse box with a few additional accessories. For my dashcam I bought a 12V to 5V (USB) converter (£5) and connected to a fuse socket using a “fuse tap” (£2).