Recently, I purchased a new car and decided to fit it with a rear facing dash cam. The Vantrue S1 camera ships with some 3M VHB tape to affix the rear camera to your rear roof liner or window but textured trim plastic and this tape were not well suited for adhesion. Neither were traditional velcro type solutions so I set about designing a bracket in Fusion 360.
The Vantrue S1 is a great all-in-one dash cam (this is an Amazon affiliate link). It cost me a hair under $200 and it just does it's job with no fuss including GPS for speed overlay on the footage.
I'm by no means a good 3d modeller and this design I found quite challenging due to the odd shapes and angles at play. Nevertheless, prototyping with a 3d printing is pretty quick and painless. After about 4-5 hours of constant model, print, model, print, I had a design that was suitable.
It's pretty interesting to see the small tweaks as I go before finally setting the printer to 0.15mm detail mode and printing the final piece which is now in the car.
In the spirit of open source, which my day job relies on by the way, I've released the model and STL on Thingiverse for free.
The bracket uses a tiny bit of hot glue just to ensure the camera boot has a nice tight fit in the slot so that it doesn't vibrate around too much in there. The footage that came out the other end is remarkably smooth and stable and the bracket attaches with no screws or other adhesives.
Here is a shot of the final finished bracket installed in position.
