This post walks through the process of replacing the “non-replaceable” battery inside a cheap cylindrical dashcam, like the one pictured above.
It’s not hard to do. I did two identical cameras. The second one took about 20 minutes. Both repairs were successful.
You don’t even have to read this post to figure it out. You can get the gist of the steps by scrolling through the pictures below.
If I learned anything from this, it’s that if I ever buy another dashcam, I’m going to be sure it’s the type that uses a capacitor instead of a battery.
What value-added does this post have?
There are dozens of YouTube videos on this topic. So you don’t lack for examples to look at. I bring four value-addeds to this task, beyond what you’ll get from those existing videos and posts.
First, I’ll show you how to open this particular camera case (and by inference, cases similar to this.) Half the trick to one of these repairs is knowing which plastic parts have to be pried off, versus which ones can’t be pried off, because there are hidden screws somewhere. Hint: The screws are hidden under the end cap where you insert the SD card.
Second, I’ll offer some guidance on finding the right replacement battery. These internal lithium-polymer (LiPo) batteries are not standardized, like AA or AAA and so on. They come in a wide range of sizes, capacities, and discharge rates. But picking a replacement isn’t rocket science. Buy a battery that’s about the same size as the one that’s in your camera now. (Duh.) But I give a bit of help in reading the specs that should be printed on your existing battery.
Third, I’ll show you a lower-stress approach to soldering in the new battery. I found no alternative to soldering. That’s a stopper for a lot of people, particularly when you’re instructed to solder the battery wires directly to the circuit board. By contrast, I find it a lot easier to leave the existing battery wires attached, and solder the new battery wires to the ends of the old battery wires. And that’s particularly easy if you do it the “wrong” way, by twisting the wires together first, as explained below.
Fourth, I show what it looks like if you just tape the replacement battery to the outside of the camera case. That saves you from having to re-open the case when the new battery dies a few years from now. Here, you can see how that will look, with the new battery neatly taped to the case, and judge whether you want to go there, or just stuff the new battery back into case, same as the old battery.
A few questions before you start
1: Do you really want to do this?
Objectively, there’s almost no way to justify repairing these cheap dashcams. I could replace this with a better camera for less than $40. And the one-time disposal of this tiny camera is negligible compared to the volume of trash I generate in a typical day..
My decision to repair my dashcams was not rational. I did this because I hate throwing out functioning electronics just because a battery has died. And I like beating the manufacturers at their own game, by fixing these instead of tossing them in the trash.
So, do this because you want to do it. Do this if you have an expensive dashcam that you want to save. Maybe do it for the challenge. But don’t do this thinking that it makes a whole lot of sense.
2: How do you know your camera has a dead battery?
Most people realize something is wrong when their dashcam no longer retains the date and time, but instead resets to its default setting every time you shut off the car. Sometimes that’s hard to spot, because the camera will pick up the current date and time from your phone, every time you connect to it. Look at your video files, and if most or all of them are dated to the exact same day, some years ago, you’ve probably got a dead internal battery.
It’s easy to miss the fact that your internal battery is dead. Your dash cam comes with a power cord that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket. Every time you turn the car on, the little lights light up, and the camera records videos. At some level, you have to ask, why does a dashcam even have an internal battery? And why should you care?
That little internal battery allows the camera to do two things: Retain the date and time (i.e., keep an internal clock running), and to record the last minute of video to the SD card, once you turn the car off.
That second function — storing the last minute of recorded video — is pretty important. If you get in a bad accident, and your car shuts off electrical power (or you immediately turn your car off), you won’t have a recording of the accident if your internal battery had died, because it won’t store the last video footage to the SD card.
3: Not every cheap cylindrical dashcam has a generic internal battery, but a whole lot of them do.
Some use a big capacitor in place of that battery. That’s a superior method, so chances are good that if your cheap cylindrical camera actually has a (“super”) capacitor, it was advertised as such.
Some name-brand dashcams use a proprietary battery pack, instead of a generic LiPo battery pack. In particular, I stumbled across a 70mai brand dashcam, in this cylindrical format, that uses a specific replacement part. So if you by chance have one of those, you may open up the case only to realize that you have no idea where to buy the replacement part. Well worth checking your owner’s manual first, if you can.
A dead internal battery is not (much of) an issue for hard-wired dashcams, that is, ones that were connected to an always-on 12V power supply. So this is really only aimed at those of us who plug the dashcam into the cigarette-lighter socket (or equivalent) that turns off when you turn off the car.
But even with a hard-wired camera, there might be problems with an elderly battery swelling and maybe splitting open. (In theory, they could catch fire, but odds of that appear to be vanishingly small.) And, maybe you can get hit so badly that it cuts off power to the entire car, and you’ll lose your last few minutes of footage. Both of those are extremely rare events.
4: Do you want to buy the two specialized tools you need to do this repair?
You have to have a soldering iron and solder. I have a section at the end where I explain why that’s true. (Or, at least, I could not find any solderless connectors likely to work in this situation.)
You’ll also need a specialty micro-sized screwdriver, to remove the tiny screws in the body of the camera. (In my case, 1 mm Phillips-head.) This is the kind that typically comes in a set of screwdriver bits sold specifically for working on electronics. Cheap six-piece “jeweler’s screwdriver” sets are too large.
5: Work time, maybe an hour. Total elapsed time, several days. Materials cost, under $10.
This really isn’t hard to do, once you’ve seen somebody do one.
But unless you already know what battery to buy, there’s going to be a few days between start and finish of this task. You have to open up the case, read the specs on the old battery, order the closest new one you can find, then wait for that new battery to be delivered before you can finish the repair.
That battery is likely to cost around $6. Toss in another $3 for some heat-shrink tubing, if you follow my directions for soldering.
YMMV
These cylindrical-format cameras all seem to use variations on the same internal circuit board. That means that the basic layout of the electronics will be the same in all such cameras. But if you look around, you’ll see every possible variation on the casing. Be prepared to modify my instructions if your camera’s case looks significantly different from mine.
Instructions
Overview: You need to split the cylindrical plastic camera body along a seam to get at the battery. For this camera, to do that, you’re going to locate the screws in the end of the camera body. Remove those screws and end plate, remove the cylindrical camera body from the mount it is in, split the plastic camera case open at a seam, and replace the battery.
Tools and materials:
- Pen knife/pocket knife.
- Teeny-weeny screwdriver (1 mm Phillips, in this case).
- Wire cutters of some sort (scissors will do).
- Replacement LiPo battery (like this one on, $5.39 on Amazon,though that will depend on the camera). See below for help on that.
- Soldering iron and solder.
- Small (3/32″) heat shrink tubing (like this stuff, $2.40 at Home Depot.)
Optional materials if you do the repair as I did it, leaving the existing battery wires in place, and mounting the new battery on the outside of the camera case:
- Small twist drill bit (1/8″ or so), to make a hole in the camera case. (Just the bit, you don’t need a drill.)
- Electrician’s tape or similar, to attach the battery to the outside of the dashcam case.
1: Where is the battery?
It’s inside the cylindrical body of the camera, opposite the camera lens, stuck to the back of the circuit board. Above you see the camera with the body open. The yellow pillow-looking thing with the black and red wires is the LiPo battery. In this picture, the lens of the dashcam is under the dashcam body, facing down.
2: How do you get to it?
You need to find a seam in the cylindrical plastic casing, running end-to-end, and then pop the casing open along that seam. The trick is finding all the stuff that will keep you from doing that, and getting that stuff out of the way.
Before you go following all my steps, you might want to slip a knife blade in that seam and gently twist and pry. It looks like at least some cameras are made to come apart there, without all the additional steps required for my camera. Note that the cheap cylindrical dashcam below has a much simpler mounting than the one pictured at the top of the post, which avoids a lot of the complication of disassembly.
If you have a camera that doesn’t have that seam, you’re out of luck, with these directions.
Here are the steps for my camera:
- Pry off the end cap
- Remove the screws
- Gently remove the camera body from the camera mount, the part within which the cylindrical camera body rotates.
- Pry open the cylindrical case.
Pry off the end cap to reveal the screws. Remove the screws using the tiniest Phillips bit you have. In my case, using a 1 mm Phillips bit. Then remove the backing plate held in place by those screws. At that point, the camera body is loose in the mounting.
Gently remove the cylindrical camera body from the camera mount (the part within which the camera body rotates.) There are TWO CAUTIONS.
CAUTION 1, Ball bearing and spring: Notice a clicky “ratchet” mechanism when the camera body rotates? That operates via a captive ball bearing and spring. When you take the camera body out, those can now fall out. So do yourself a favor and take them out and put them aside.
CAUTION 2: Electrical connections between camera and mount. Depending on the camera, the USB socket may be in the base, in which case there will be a connector between base and camera body. You have to make sure not to break this now, and to stuff this connector back in the right spot as you re-assemble.
Split the cylindrical case lengthwise. You should see a seam on the case. Work a sharp knife blade in there and gently pry the cylindrical case apart, to reveal the innards.
3: Buy a new LiPo battery.
More or less any size, shape, or form of LiPo battery is available on Amazon. It’s just a question of figuring out which one is the right one for your camera.
Caution: If you have a battery pack that looks like the one above, with red and black wires soldered to the circuit board, then proceed. But if you have anything else, and in particular, if you have a battery pack that has more than two wires, or has a specific manufacturer’s part number on it, or is mounted with a socket (rather than soldered to the board), then stop. If that’s the case, then you want to hunt down that exact replacement part number, if you can, and ignore the rest of this section. This section only applies to generic two-wire LiPo battery packs that are soldered in place.
The battery will be held down with a bit of double-sided sticky foam or tape. Pull it up now, and for convenience, cut the wires, one wire at a time, and cut them at the battery, not at the circuit board, to maintain your options for repairing this.
These lithium polymer (LiPo) battery packs contain all the electronics for charging, right inside the battery pack. (That’s a little circuit board, at the left edge of the battery pack above). So it really is as simple as attaching the red and black battery wires to the right spots on the circuit board. As long as you get a LiPo battery pack that’s roughly the right size, and electrical capacity, it should work.
With one caveat, explained below, relating to how fast the battery can be discharged. You’re going to have to take a guess at that.
There’s probably not going to be a “part number” on the battery. (If there is, see “caution” above.) But the odds are that your old battery will have most of the key information printed on it, as mine did, on the side stuck to the circuit board, as shown above:
- Voltage: 3.7 volts, which is what a single lithium cell will be.
- Capacity: It can deliver 160 milli-amp-hours of current, which works out to 0.59 watt-hours of energy, at 3.7 volts.
- The approximate form factor is 25mm x 15mm x 5.0mm, verified by measuring it. That’s written as 501525 on the battery exterior.
Caveat: What the battery does NOT tell you is how fast it can be discharged (or charged). For that, you have to take a guess, and gamble on what will be adequate. Some batteries are designed to provide a trickle of current, over a long period of time. Like a watch battery. Others are designed to produce a big flood of current, briefly. Like the starting battery of a car. When in doubt, if given a choice, opt for the battery that’s about the same capacity and size as what’s in your camera now, but is rated for a higher discharge current.
Now find something similar on Amazon or alternative, searching for LiPo battery. The voltage must match exactly. (You can’t use a 7.4V battery pack in a device that calls for a 3.7 volt battery). The size and capacity just have to be close.
For my camera, I picked this one, above. It’s actually wider than the one it’s replacing (25mm x 20mm, instead of 25mm x 15mm), but, as you will see below, that doesn’t matter. It has a slightly larger electrical capacity (165 mah, versus 160 mah), and it has a high maximum discharge current (one amp, or 1000 milliamps). This should be good enough.
If you have no clue as to the battery’s capacity, buy one that’s the same dimensions as the one you took out of your camera. Capacity is pretty closely correlated with size, for a given battery chemistry. If you buy one that’s the right size, you’re probably buying one that’s about the right electrical capacity as well.
4: Pick your replacement method.
4A: Standard approach: Solder the new battery wires to the circuit board.
4B: Leave the old wires in place, solder to the old wires, put the battery back inside the camera case.
4C: Leave the old wires in place, solder to the old wires, and mount the new battery on the exterior of the camera case. This will make it much easier to replace, when it, too, eventually dies. But it looks ugly.
I’m going for 4C, because my camera is not very visible, and I want to be able to replace this new battery, easily, when it dies.
4A: Replace the battery in the standard fashion.
Most internet instructions tell you to solder the new battery leads directly to the circuit board, right where the old ones are soldered now.
No need for me to reinvent the wheel. You can find plenty of YouTube videos that will show you this step, for a variety of larger-format dashcams. Done by people who have better soldering skills than I have. For this step, just do what they did. My only tip is to take close-up of the circuit board showing the attachment points of the red and black battery wires before you start. Just in case you forget.
I’m not here to give you directions on how to solder. But briefly: Plug in the soldering iron, tin the tip and the ends of the wires. (That is, melt a bit of fresh solder on the tip, then heat the ends of the wires and do the same.) Remove the old wires by touching the tip of the soldering iron to the circuit board, to melt the solder holding them in place, then gently pulling them up. (Up, to avoid smearing solder across the circuit board traces.) Place the new leads where they need to go, and just kind of hold them in place with the soldering iron for a couple of seconds. If all goes well, there’s enough solder there (from tinning the ends) to connect those wires to the board. Remove the iron, hold the lead still for a second until the solder cools, then give it a gentle tug to see that it’s firmly attached.
Stick the battery in place with the double-sided tape or foam from the old battery. Re-assemble, taking caution with the ball bearing/spring and electrical leads. And you are done.
4B and 4C: Or try these alternatives, particularly if you are unsure of your soldering skills.
In my ham-handed experience, several things can go wrong with the standard approach. If you manage to drop or smear solder across the traces (metal tracks) on the circuit board, and you don’t remove it completely, you can short-circuit something when you turn the device back on. If there are delicate components mounted near the place where the wires attach, you can fry them if you leave the soldering iron in contact with the board for too long. Alternatively, the more mass you need to heat up, the more likely it is that you’ll accidentally get a poorly-conductive “cold” solder joint, from not being patient enough to get everything up to temperature. And you can forget what was where, and solder the new wires to the wrong place.
I prefer to leave the old wires in place, still attached to the circuit board. Then simply solder the wires for the new battery to whatever is left of the wires from the old battery. As long as the electrical connection is sound, it makes no difference that you have an extra inch or two of wire in the circuit.
And it’s a lot easier to do, if you do it the “wrong” way, shown below.
Option 4B: Solder to the existing wires, not directly to the circuit board.
The only difference between this, and step 4A, is that you leave the wires in place, strip ~3/8″ of insulation off the ends of the old wires, and solder your new battery wires to the pre-existing wires. Red-to-red, black-to-black.
4B.1 Stripping insulation from tiny little electrical wires.
Stripping wire this tiny can be tricky, so I’m going to explain my technique. I’ve never seen a wire stripper that can handle wire that small. I certainly don’t own one. I prefer to use a not-very-sharp pocket knife to gently score the insulation, all the way around the wire, then pull that insulation off.
Details: Hold the knife blade edge-up, lay the end of the wire over the blade edge, use the ball of your thumb to gently rub the wire back and forth, just a fraction of an inch, along the knife edge, as you turn the attached device, to rotate the wire. Having your thumb in contact with the knife edge is a reminder not to press too hard. Easy does it. Rotate until you’ve scored a thin cut into the plastic insulation, all the way around the wire. Then grab the end of the insulation with your fingernails, and see if you can pull it off, leaving the bare wire intact. Still stuck on? You were too gentle. Give it a few more scrapes in the same place, and try again. By contrast, did most of the wire came off with the insulation? Not gentle enough — you cut through some of the wires. Clip off the end and try it again. If you do this enough times, you’ll get to the point where you recognize the feeling of wire scraping on knife blade, so you’ll know when to stop.
4B.2: Soldering the easier (wrong) way.
Soldering the new battery wires to the old wires, red-to-red, black-to-black, can be tricky. There are soldering how-to-solder tutorials all over the internet, to get you through this step. One way or the other. I do this the “wrong” way, because it’s much easier.
The “right” way: Every soldering tutorial will tell you to do this the right way, by aligning the two wires in the same line, overlapping/enmeshing the bare ends, and soldering it so that it looks like one long, straight wire when you are done. That gives you a strong, sleek joint that is easily covered by (e.g.) a bit of heat-shrink tubing that you slipped over one wire before soldering.
The well-recognized problem with doing this the right way is that you need three hands. Even with the soldering iron sitting on the table, weighted so that it sits tip-up for easy access, you still need one hand for each piece of wire, and one hand to hold the solder.
Soldering wires the wrong way, as shown below. For fiddly little wires like this, I much prefer to solder them together the “wrong” way. Put the wires side-by-side. Twist the two bare wire ends together. It you’re using heat-shrink tubing, slip a bit of that over the wires now, to help hold them together. (Or, use a bit of tape to hold the wires together. Or just rely on the twisted metal ends to hold them together.) Now you only need two hands: One to hold the pair of wires onto the tip of the soldering iron (that is resting on the table, tip up, with the end weighted down by a book or similar), and one to touch the solder to the hot wires.
The “wrong” way results in an awkward, weak joint between the wires, compared to doing it the “right” way. But it’s waaay easier to do. As long as you don’t put a lot of stress on those wires, it works just fine.
Do yourself a favor and use heat-shrink tubing to insulate the bare wire. You could do it with electrician’s tape, but heat-shrink tubing is much neater, and doesn’t turn gummy in the heat of the car interior. It’s worth the $2.40 and the trip to Home Depot for some 3/32″ diameter heat shrink tubing. Just put a tiny bit of tubing over the bare wire, and hold that close to the tip of the soldering iron until it shrinks in place.
Option 4C: Optionally, solder to the existing wires AND mount the battery outside the case.
These new batteries are going to be dead in a couple of years. Do you really want to crack that case open again? If the dashcam is an an inconspicuous place, you can mount the new battery on the outside of the case. Then wrap it in the tape of your choice.
I did that on one of the two cameras I was rehabbing, because I never have to see it. It’s definitely on the ugly side, but it works.
Take a small twist drill bit, and put a hole in the plastic camera casing, just large enough to feed those wires through. For any garden-variety dashcam, you can do this by twirling the drill bit between thumb and forefinger. Takes about 30 seconds.
Now re-assemble the camera, with the wires poking out. As above. As you re-assemble, take caution to get the ball/spring and electrical connector back where they belong. .
Solder the new battery to those wires, just as in 4B above. No need to repeat those directions.
Then attach the battery to the case using electrician’s tape, or something nicer, if you have it. Electrician’s tape, particularly cheap electrician’s tape, tends to turn gummy when it gets hot. But that will be a problem for future you, when you go to replace this battery after it has died a couple of years from now.
Plug in and test.
Plug it in and see that all is working well. In particular, leave it plugged in for an hour or so, to allow the battery to charge and to make sure you’ve done nothing wrong, the new battery is in good shape, and nothing is getting excessively hot.
Then run it through its paces — does the dashcam retain the time and date, does it save the last minute of video prior to shutdown, and so on. If so, mount it in your car, plug it in, and you are done.
If so, you’re done.
Useless background 1: Just another example of disposable electronics
I have a couple of dashcams. Little bitty cheap ones, like the one pictured above.
Mine are zombies. They’re mostly dead. They work just fine with their power cords plugged in and the car turned on. But their small, non-replaceable internal batteries have died. They always think its 1/1/2017 when the car turns on, and they’ll lose the last minute of recording when the car power turns off. Something that may occur, say, in a bad accident. That makes them essentially useless for their intended purpose.
Turns out, this happens to almost all dashcams. Almost all of them use internal lithium polymer (LiPo) rechargeable batteries. Those all die in just a few years, particularly given the harsh environment of a car interior.
This means that almost all dashcams are disposables, absent some fairly significant owner interventions. And yet, somehow, none of the product advertising on Amazon seems to mention that. As if it just didn’t much matter. As if everybody who doesn’t want to hard-wire them to their car’s 12V battery simply buys a new one every couple of years, and everybody’s OK with that.
Useless background 2: No other good option but to replace the non-replaceable battery.
For me, DIY electronics repairs are a sketchy proposition at best. But here are the alternatives to that, as I see it.
- Just chuck it in the trash and buy a new cheap one, like a regular American. I can buy what appears to be the same camera for about $40 on Amazon.
- There are very-high-end dashcams with batteries set up for easy user replacement. We seem to be talking $750 a pop or so. Not interested.
- There are reportedly dashcams that use a “super”capacitor instead of a battery, exactly to avoid this problem. But that’s what I thought I bought, on Amazon. So you can avoid this if you can find one. And if it actually is as-advertised.
- You can hard-wire your camera to your car’s 12V battery. It’s not hard to do in most cars, but in if you do that, the camera is constantly draining the 12V battery. For a wide range of reasons, I don’t want to do that.
- You’d think you could just run the camera off a portable battery pack — the sort that you might use to recharge your phone on the go. But these cameras use on-order-of five watts when running. If you only run your car every couple of days, to recharge that battery pack, you’d need a power pack that costs more than a dashcam, in order to run your dashcam.
- I could take it to an electronics repair shop, if I could find one that would work on a cheap dashcam. But I’m sure that would cost more than a replacement dashcam. So I doubt that anybody works on these.
Those seemed to cover the alternatives, to me.
The upshot is that the most sensible thing to do, given that I already own what I own, is to replace the battery myself.
Useless background 3: One way or the other, you have to solder the new one in place.
This is just a heads-up, in case you’re looking for a fix that didn’t involve soldering. Near as I can tell, there isn’t one.
The problem is that the wires involved are tiny and the wire itself is aluminum, not copper. The battery wires in this dashcam are 28 American Wire Gauge (AWG) aluminum wires. Almost no wire connectors can deal with wire this small, and most wire connectors are designed for copper wire, not aluminum, anyway.
This is compounded by the tight space within the case of the camera. There’s just not a lot of room for putting mechanical wire splices in place, if you’re going to fit everything back into the camera case when you’re done.
My conclusion, after a couple of hours of searching, is that you really have no practical alternative to soldering the new battery in place.
Afterward: How does it make you feel?
There’s no good, logical reason that I did this repair. For $40 every two years or so, I could just keep chucking my dashcam in the trash and buying new, every time the internal battery dies. Easy-peasy. Or better yet, buy one that claims to have a capacitor instead of a battery, and maybe not have to chuck it in the trash every couple of years.
That’s not a lot of money, and it’s maybe an couple of ounces of plastic and metal, so, financially or environmentally, who cares? I am sure that I routinely generate many times the weight of this camera, in municipal solid waste, every single day.
And screwing around with this one-off electronics repair is probably not a high-valued use of my time. I doubt that I’ve made minimum wage, figuring out and implementing this fix.
But throwing away functioning electronics, just because the battery has died, really gets under my skin. So there’s that.
And I take a totally disproportionate amount of joy at beating the manufacturers at their own game.
At the end of the day, the decision to fix these cheap cylindrical dashcams wasn’t rational. It was all about the feeling.
I hope you found this helpful.
