So After 8 months with the Roadster I feel Dash Cams are a necessity for the vehicle;
there are too many people that do not know what the car is; either come up too close to the rear of your vehicle at a light or are tail gating you just to be a dick; or they just do not care because you are going the speed limit while they are going 70mph in a 45mph zone. Few instances more than once I was like “I need to get a dashcam”.
Jason of the teslamotorsclub.com.

It’s kind of disappointing that with some of the modern tech we have today if you want 24-hour surveillance and monitoring of your car or vehicle, the only solution is to “Pay” for one of the LTE or Cloud hosting Dash Cam services like Parrot, NexAR, or BlackVUE. As for the size of the cameras and all the connected gear, well…

These cameras are often big and bulky, and there should be no need to pay monthly for any of these services. It’s a nice feature to have but what times are we living in? Let’s face it, everyone is trying to make money.

So, some techie enthusiasts who want to get round this problem like to try and record all their road trips direct to their own PC or computer. One suggested way to do this is to create a Raspberry Pi Board with the Raspberry Pi Camera Board V2.

It could be integrated inside the Rear view mirror or somehow integrated into another part of the car which might be even better. You could try to find a location, such as maybe modifying the “Gauge cover” or maybe even getting a different cover so as to see how best to integrate the camera into the gauge cover?

Anyone can try to come up with new ideas, but about 5 years back someone with a Lotus apparently attempted the same thing so clearly there are some examples of motor enthusiasts actually attempting to do this.

With this setup we could have a similar solution as in the newer Teslas – it is possible to use a 500gb or 1TB hard drive to capture the footage front and rear, then store a laptop in the trunk for instant replay on the go without any use of cloud or monthly subscription services.

Are there many people with good enough programming or technical skills who would be able to attempt this project? You would need to purchase the hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi Board Kit with a Raspberry Pi Camera Board module (The Camera Board can be bought separately if you already have the basic kit) in order to move forward and give it a try. But in theory there is no reason why not.
See link below for some technical data.

Raspberry Pi Car Cam overlaid with OBD data

The Raspberry-Pi Rpi3Bp-Inabox-Kit Single Board Computer Kit, Raspberry Pi includes a camera board.

Frankly, you could just get the new Blackvue Dashcam or one similar. If you go with the basic service you don’t pay any monthly fees. However when parked it won’t record. For that you’ll need a mobile hotspot (which through your phone carrier would charge a monthly fee). It’s small. You won’t notice it at all. The photo above of that camera sticking out of the dash is way uglier than a modern compact DashCam that you can buy!