Cycliq Bike Camera Review: Fly12 Sport and Fly6CE Gen3

I purchased replacement Cycliq cameras in late October 2022 when I checked my cam footage after a particularly frightening incident of harassment by a driver, and discovered the cheaper camera I was using hadn’t captured the license*.

My main reason for having these is still driver accountability. (And I shouldn’t have to do this! But that’s another post.)

I use the Fly12 Sport as my front cam and the Fly6 Gen 3 as the rear cam. Battery life is still excellent; the Fly12 lasts at least 5 hours; I can get 4 out of the Fly6.

What’s changed from the previous models:

The mounts have supposedly been “improved” in some way, but the cameras still snap in to the old mounts just fine. Getting the cams on and off the new mounts the first few times was VERY difficult – I had to get out the vise grips on the Fly6.

The Fly6 came with a non-elastic leash; I really prefer the elastic ones from the prior version.

Both cams now have nifty silicon cases for extra water protection.

The case for the Fly6 comes with two lens protectors, one each for the camera and light. They’re a lot easier to put in when the case is off the camera, but it’s fussy to put the case on without making the protectors pop back out. You also have to take the case off for charging, and connecting to a PC to view your footage. (I just found the smaller of the lens protectors a couple of weeks ago, after about a year of it flying off and getting lost.)

Bluetooth pairing (with my mid-range Android phone) works on the first try about 75% of the time, which is a big improvement – good enough that I don’t have to mess with the desktop app at all. (I don’t know if the app is even available anymore.)

These keep time now when they’re off; I don’t have to resync them much.

They’ve been much more reliable so far. I haven’t had to do a factory reset on either camera.

The Fly 12 Sport is lighter and smaller than the original. It also comes with an info screen, which tells you the amount of battery left, the time, and the lighting mode. I like this more than I thought I would.

The Fly12 Sport has more resolution and frame rate options. HDR is available at 1080p 30fps. I experimented with these settings a bit, and settled on 1440p and 30 fps plus image stabilization. The HDR is nice, but you can’t use it with image stabilization, which is more important on our roads here.

For the Fly 6, I’m using 1080p 30fps with a 5-minute video length.

Resulting .mp4 file sizes
Fly12 Sport: 1440 30fps + 5 minutes = 1.1 GB
Fly6 Gen3: 1080p 30fps + 5 minutes = 800 MB

The manual still says “We highly recommend formatting your microSD card regularly.” What is “regular”? Are we talking daily? Once a quarter? It would be nice to have an “after [x] hours of use” guideline.

I accidentally bought the wrong case for the Fly12 (got the one that fits my dead camera) and the customer service folks were good about exchanging it, I just had to pay shipping.

HOWEVER. If you can make your website pop up “hey, you’re buying product x, do you want these accessories with it?” it should also be able to check the order: “hey, you’re purchasing accessory y which doesn’t fit product x in your cart – are you sure?” because that could save a lot of hassle. I can’t be the only person who made this mistake.

All that’s left to test is longevity and durability. I’ve had this set about 14 months and really hope they last past the 18 month mark, where the previous set started to die.

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• It turned out that the car itself was distinctive enough that the perp was caught and charged, but that took several months.

Bike Camera Review: Cycliq Fly12CE and Fly6CE Gen2

This is a review of the Cycliq Fly12CE and Fly6CE Gen 2 bike cameras, which I purchased in March 2020. (Note that this version of the Fly6 is no longer available on their website.)

tl;dr: These are decent cameras with long battery life, easy on/off from the mounts, but the bottom line is they are not up for the rigors of year-round biking in the US Pacific Northwest. The Fly6 (rear camera) didn’t quite last 18 months. The Fly12 (front camera) lasted 21. These cameras have a one-year warranty, which IMO is pretty short for something this expensive. I may be having a “Get Off My Lawn” moment.

The details:

My main reason for purchasing bike cameras is driver accountability. My top three requirements:

• Image stability and detail; gotta be able to read license plates!
• Long battery life; my regular commute is about 30-45 minutes each way, and I’m out for 4-6 hours for recreational rides.
• Easy on/off the bike when I have to park it somewhere.
• Low maintenance.

What was good:
These cams are purpose-built for biking and it shows. They have integrated lights with multiple flash/still modes, a very simple click-in mount system, and stellar battery life. The Fly12 picked up my normal Outside Voice very well, and caught both sides of some important conversations. (The Fly6 only picked up road noise and my rear derailleur shifting, as expected.) Videos are stored as .mp4s and automatically loop and rewrite over old data. The support people aren’t jerks.

What needed work:
Just about everything else.

The video quality was ok; I could read some license plates most of the time. Image stabilization was decent on pavement and minor gravel; it was impossible to get a usable video on aggregate surfaces (e.g. our “Extreme Camera Testbed” of southbound 29th between SE Salmon and Division.) I would not recommend this for recording your mtb rides.

Both cameras are USB chargeable. The Fly6 (rear) has one of those little rubber flaps protecting the port; it broke off after the third ride. This is simply not acceptable. I have a PDW taillight with a nearly identical setup that’s still attached to the light 5 years later. (May be time for a collab?) The Fly12’s port is a bit more protected from the elements by a door.

Interacting with the cams was challenging. Neither would reliably pair (Bluetooth) with any of my (mid-range Android) phones; I was successful maybe 30% of the time. This meant I couldn’t consistently control the cams via the Cycliq Android app.

The desktop app is only available for Windows and Mac. I tried both, but still had frequent problems with the app recognizing the cams.

Viewing the videos always worked when just mounting the cam as an external drive on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

The timestamps on the videos were never right – the cam doesn’t keep time when it’s turned off. Apparently that is a regular feature/bug of action cameras. You have to sync or reset before each use and I do not have time for that, especially with the Bluetooth flakiness.

The Fly12 was much heavier than I’d want to wear on my head. For me, this camera is handlebar-mount only.

The Fly6 (the rear cam) has minimal installation options; I have a Thudbuster and thus couldn’t install it on my seatpost. Plus I have a trunk bag, and that would make for a boring video. So I rigged it up to go on one of the stays on my rack (a Salsa Wanderlust from 2014, which has beefy stays – this may not work on other racks).

From the beginning, recording on the Fly6 was problematic. I’d get back from a ride and discover that it had just stopped recording partway through, even though it had plenty of battery life. I had to factory reset it about every 2-3 weeks at first, then discovered that it would also randomly start working without any intervention, so I’d just cross my fingers and hope it was recording. It gave up the ghost about 6 months out of warranty.

About 9 months out of warranty, the Fly12 started randomly missing video segments, not naming them in order, etc. A month later, it would only take a series of stills every few minutes, with no sound. This rendered the camera unusable for my purposes, as it only takes a few seconds for, hypothetically speaking, some asscricket in an Audi to blast past me on the left, driving into oncoming traffic while I’m clearly signalling a left turn, and it’s unlikely the cam would catch that in its random captures. Multiple attempts to fix this on my own (factory reset, reformatting the SD card, trying a new SD card, etc) bore no fruit, so I contacted support.

Support was nice enough; they pointed out first thing that it was out of warranty but they’d try to help anyway, and in the end offered me a 20% off coupon if I wanted to purchase a replacement camera, but ultimately were unable to fix the issue.

I did end up purchasing Cycliq replacements, despite my not-great experience with these, mainly because I wasn’t able to find anything with equivalent battery life. I’ve been using the Fly12 Sport and the Fly6CE Gen3 for about a month and a half now; they’re better so far but I’m reserving judgment for a few more months.

Ideas for future PDXPUG workshops

The recent Streaming Rep Lab at PDXPUG was such an excellent learning experience. I really want to continue having these sessions.

Our definition of a “workshop” is pretty loose. There’s a basic list of topics we want to cover, but no real agenda or leader; it is truly a group effort.

Here are some ideas I’m toying with for future workshops.

– Choosing a High Availability plan
– Different ways to take backups
– Troubleshooting slow queries
– Monitoring (this could easily be a series on its own)
– Disaster Recovery
– Oh no, somebody deleted pg_xlog
– Transaction wraparound
– Postgres on zfs
– Postgres packet captures
– Tour of contrib modules
– Foreign Data Wrappers
– Benchmarking changes to GUCs, e.g. maintenance_work_mem.

Update: I started a wiki page, so other group members can add their ideas.

Schedule set for PDXPUG’s PgDay

We have our speaker lineup for PgDay:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PDXPUGDay2011

Sign up here, if you haven’t already.

This Week in Geekville: Barcamp!

This was my first Barcamp. I’m sad I couldn’t make it to all of Saturday’s sessions – they looked great!

I only made it to two talks. First, Peter Eschright’s “Rat Salad” talk, which, I admit, I was attracted to by the possibility of gross stories. (I have some, being a former employee of CFSAN myself*.) We had an interesting discussion on what software development industry can learn from food safety initiatives.

Next up, my session on munin. (Which is pronounced “moonin”, like the thing you do on the Barfly bus.) I was hoping to find other users to discuss it, but that seemed to be what everyone came to the session looking for too. Next time I will just do my standard network management intro talk & review of tools. This was too specific for Barcamp, I think.

Igals’ TrainPorn session was next on my list, but I got sucked into Audrey Eschright’s “Creating Awkwardness” on my way through the forum. Lots of discussion about circles of friends vs circles of trust, how to protect your information, and of course some tales from the trenches (my favorite part.)

The beer ran out 30 minutes before my “How to change a flat” session. One should never attempt bike maintenance without beer, but we did anyway. We had a bigger crowd than I expected. Thanks to @robotadam for being a spokesmodel**, and @shawnzyoo for the backup!

I finished up with an intro yo-yo session from @pdxyoyo, and only hit myself in the face once.

It was fun meeting people I’ve only been hearing about. :) Thanks to Cubespace for hosting & providing yummy yummy food.

Coming up next week, apparently I’m participating in the QA talk at PDX.pm. I’ll be the one wearing a red shirt.

* My copy of the “Food Defect Action Levels” publication is a big hit at parties.
** Pun intentional.