I’ve been slowly working on installing the Gen5DIY Front/Rear camera kit. The kit included a new mirror with a built-in screen, a front camera with its own switch, a backup camera, and of course all the necessary wiring harnesses.
My first thought on the mirror was, “darn, that looks huge”. But now that it’s mounted, I don’t even notice it anymore. I haven’t decided where I am going to mount the front camera yet. It will need to be grounded near its location, so I’ll probably wait until after my car is out of hibernation so I can pull the front bumper off and find a good spot for the camera. However, I wasn’t too keen with the idea of drilling a hole to mount the front camera switch. So for the first modification to the kit, I isolated the wire that sends power to the front camera and tapped that into my Line Lock arming switch in my cupholder switch plate. This is the switch that energizes the Line Lock momentary switch. Here's a shot testing out the front camera (note that I haven't removed the blue film yet so the picture isn't as clear as it should be)
The back-up camera has been giving me the most trouble so far. The camera provided in the kit (shown below) is designed to mount above the license plate.
Although it appears to be a lot smaller than what was included in previous kits, I just couldn’t bring myself to have it hanging down in front of my plate. So I decided I would mount it on the bottom of the rear crash bar and have it peer through a small hole in the diffuser.
I got it all wired up and removed most of the interior to run the wires up to the driver’s side fuse box. Luckily, it was a warm enough day that I could open the garage door up to fire up the car and put it in reverse. To my dismay, no video appeared in the mirror. After doing some more research, I tried connecting the camera to a different wire on the harness…but that did not work either.
One thing I did learn is that I cannot test power at the harness to confirm which wire gets power while the car is running and in reverse...at least not by myself. At one point, I thought maybe my reverse lights weren’t working so I setup my camera to record while I started it up. It was a pretty cool video of a very slow start as my battery wasn’t hooked up to the tender and I was playing around a lot with the lights…but I was able to confirm the reverse lights are working.
Fast forward a couple more weeks, I ended up getting a new/different backup camera off of Amazon.
This one is designed to be flush mounted, so it will be a lot more secure than how I had the original one mounted. Since I had to remove my center console to tap into my Line Lock switch and have my interior ripped apart, I also decided to run a new wire to expand my exterior lights. With this, I was able to successfully test the new backup camera. I’ll just have to pull the back bumper off again, as I think I will tap this camera directly into the wires at the reverse lights.
Here's how it looks from the outside. Unfortunately, the drill that came with the camera chewed a little bit of the diffuser, so I'll have to try and sand that down to it doesn't look so crazy.
