It feels reckless to drill holes and change wires on a new truck, but I’m going to keep doing it.

In the thirteen years that I had my last truck, I modified it to add desirable features.  My new truck doesn’t have those features, but it does display a bunch of cryptic symbols as it does stuff that I am already doing.  Stuff like steering and watching what other cars are doing.

If the new truck can’t do as much as the old truck, I will grow to resent it.  Since I have the time and some experience, the modifications should be even better than the last truck.

The project is to mount the dash cam in a way that doesn’t look haphazard.

Don’t ask why I need a dash cam.  That isn’t helpful unless my truck already has a dash cam, and I just don’t know about it, or ODOT is going to be installing free dash cams on all of the cars, and I failed to read the notification.

Last time, the dash cam was clamped to the rear view mirror stalk and powered by a USB cord snaked along the edge of the headliner.  Not cool.

The housing of the sensor pod around the rear view mirror, came off easily.  Once that was off, attaching the camera mount was just picking the right spot, drilling a hole, and screwing from the back.

The location was picked so the camera is mostly in front of the rear view mirror, so it reduce my field of view.

Powering the camera can be the tricky part.  Cars are 12 Volt systems, but it’s not a clean and consistent voltage.  The camera has a USB plug, so runs on 5 Volts.

There is plenty of room under the housing, so a DC-DC buck converter was installed to tap into the 12 V supplied to the rear view mirror.

Here is the before and after the installation of the buck converter.  The green arrow points to the converter, and the power wires have red shrink tubing.

A buck converter is a handy kit.  I had one for the camper that I took to school to test.  The input voltage and current were measure and compared to the output voltage and current.  The module’s performance exceeded unity.  That’s an antiquated way of saying power coming out was greater than the power going in, so the efficiency exceeded 100%. 

Since the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn’t allow that, I suspect that our crude measurements had a margin of error bigger than the energy loss.

Put back together, it looks like this.

The driver sees something like this.

It’s dark out, so I didn’t fully adjust my rear view mirror.  The location looks good, but I want to drive with it for a few days.