A small project that aims to automate pulling files off of the Vantrue N4 Pro dashcam

What I have managed to do is gain telnet and ftp access to my Vantrue N4 Pro dashcam and successfully reconfigured it to act as a WPA supplicant (WiFi client) during parking mode. To do this yourself it will require some familiarity with a commandline. I am running NixOS (btw) and so any non-dashcam specific commands are likely to be the NixOS version, I'll make a note of this as we go through.

This project also assumes you have a battery for your dashcam that allows it to go into parking mode. While it is likely possible to have the dashcam turn on WiFi while driving this seems of little utility to me.

1. Enable WiFi to be always on
2. CHANGE THE DEFAULT WIFI PASSWORD (seriously, do this)
3. Connect to the Dashcam's access point with a device capable of using telnet
4. telnet into the Dashcam (username root, no password)
5. CHANGE THE ROOT PASSWORD (using passwd)
6. Modify the /usr/share/wifiscripts/down.sh script
7. Modify the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf script
8. Create a ftpuser
9. symlink /mnt/sd to the ftpuser's home directory
10. Done? The rest of this is all network side, not based on the dashcam

This is simply done using the Dashcam's buttons, navigate to System Settings > WiFi > WiFi Auto On and change the on/off/on for 10 minutes to be just on.

Do this in the Vantrue app

I will be doing this with my laptop, for those on NixOS you need to add pkgs.inetutils to your packages or run a nix shell (nix-shell -p inetutils). The dashcam will broadcast it's AP as soon as it powers on but will turn it off when it goes into parking mode (which happens after 10-15 minues). Restart the dashcam and wait for it's AP to become available, join the WiFi network and then attempt to telnet in:

telnet 192.168.1.254

It will as for a username, this should just be root, no password should be queried for. If all goes well you should be dropped into a shell.

Use command passwd and enter new password when prompted. It will complain about not having permissions to a file, I have found this doesn't actually affect changing the password.

Because I don't know how litigous Vantrue are, and there are no licence markers on the files I won't share the full files but I will share the script segments I have written which you can append yourself. Navigate to /usr/share/wifiscripts/

cd /usr/share/wifiscripts

You can now use vi to edit the down.sh file. Append the contents of the down-append.sh file to down.sh ensuring that exit 0 is only present after the appended code and not before.

The down.sh file is called when the dashcam goes into parking mode to turn off the WiFi and therefore save power. Given this we can modify it wait till the AP is turned off and then reconfigure the WiFi interface to turn on as a WPA supplicant. In laymans terms, act like a normal WiFi devices and connect to a WiFi network. My script goes a bit further and will only keep the WiFi on if my home WiFi SSID is available and the dashcam can connect to it. This is so that the dashcam isn't keeping WiFi on during parking mode everywhere, only in my garage so I can pull footage from it. Once you complete this process and have the dashcam successfully connecting to your WiFi the WiFi Auto On option in the dashcam menu can be set to off without affecting this script's functionality. This makes the dashcam much more secure as WPA2 Personal (which is what I believe it is using in AP mode) is insecure and you don't want it broadcasting this while driving.

The wpa_supplicant.conf file defines what WiFi network we will be joining. The wpa_supplicant.conf file in this repo is the exact contents you require except replacing the CAPS statements with the correct info. If your WiFi is WPA Enterprise there is capability to support that but I won't delve into it here because, well, if you have WPA Enterprise you can likely figure it out :p.

After you have done this you should be able to put the dashcam in parking mode and see it connect to your WiFi. If that happens you can complete the following steps over your LAN instead, this stops you being interrupted by the dashcam going into parking mode every 10-15 minutes and turning off the AP.

This step is technically optional, you could just use the root user for this but that gives me the ick. To add a user run the following commands:

mkdir -p /home/ftpuser
adduser --home /home/ftpuser ftpuser
passwd ftpuser

enter the password for ftpuser when prompted

The ftp server will drop the user into their home directory by default, instead of changing that behaviour I've decided to create a symbolic link to the /mnt/sd directory which is where the footage is stored. To create the symlink

cd /home/ftpuser
ln -s /mnt/sd

I am still deciding how I will get the footage off the dashcam from a home server standpoint so this is as far as the guide (such as it is) will go. I hope to update this in future when I have a solution.