Aukey DR02: One Year Later

A year of living with the DR02

Just like my one-year revisit of the ASUS AC1300 router, I like to come back a year or so after recommending something to see what it is actually like to live with, the good and the bad. It is also the perfect moment to answer the pile of questions I have been asked about the DR02 since the original review and install guide. If you have not read that one, start there and come back.

For a device that is meant to be installed and forgotten until you need it, the Aukey has performed marvelously. I mounted it completely out of sight, so I genuinely forgot it was there. When I did need footage I would pop out the SD card, copy it off, and pop it back in. It has simply done its job.

What the DR02 caught in a year

Even driving in and around Atlanta, I am happily surprised that the only truly dramatic clip from a year of footage is this one: a driver leaving an apartment complex who underestimates the turn, pops the curb, and hits a light pole. Good thing no one was pulling out of the gas station at the same time. Beyond that it was the usual daily nonsense, a box truck running a light, someone in a serious hurry, and, fine, me crossing a few lanes at once. The point is the DR02 was always rolling and always legible.

The DR02's only real glitch

The single issue I ran into was corrupted frames that popped up seemingly at random during playback. Out of more than 40 hours of footage I actually reviewed, maybe 12 frames were obviously corrupted. Extrapolating across the roughly 400 hours the DR02 has recorded, that works out to about a 0.8 percent rate, or around three minutes of unusable footage in 400 hours. Not a big deal, unless of course it lands exactly when you need it.

When I first noticed them I swapped the Kingston 64GB UHS-1 card for a Samsung 128GB UHS-3 card, both good cards, but after three months the same frames appeared at about the same rate. That is the sort of question a bench settles rather than a hunch: I now run every card through CKBench and verify every byte written comes back intact. So I suspect a transcoding quirk in the camera itself, or some cosmic bit-flipping, rather than the card. It never became a real problem, and everything else, the video quality day and night and all the hardware, held up over the year.

Two upgrades that made it better

Two small changes improved the setup a lot. First, that gray double-sided tape on the mounts stands out far too much from outside, as many of you confirmed. I replaced it with the same 3M VHB adhesive in black. To swap it, I removed the camera, carefully lifted the bracket with a safety blade so as not to scratch the glass, peeled off the gray tape, and stuck on about a one-and-a-quarter-inch piece of the black VHB. That is all you need, and it blends in far better.

Second, dashboard glare on the windshield had bugged me since I bought the car. I added a soft black dash mat over the dashboard of my 2013 Honda Fit, a generic inexpensive one, and the difference is night and day. There is technically still a reflection, but because the mat is black and fuzzy instead of shiny plastic, the view out the windshield looks almost gamma-corrected and crisper. I fully recommend a dash mat to fix this on any car.

Does the DR02 still hold up?

If you want an entry-level dash cam you can install and stop thinking about, this was it. After a year of service I had no real complaints, just the occasional harmless glitched frame and two easy upgrades that made a good thing better.

Since Aukey has left the dash cam market, the cam I would point you to today is the VIOFO A229 Plus. If you want to size a memory card for it, my dash cam storage calculator does the math.