Project Ford E350 Tow Rig: Part 4 – Calling for backup!
black cable electrical taped to stiff copper wire
Once the frame is reinstalled, you need to snake the power and video cord through that rubber door thing to get to the cable end that’s attached to the frame.

I don’t own a fish tape, so I used a really stiff piece of copper wire. I pushed the wire through the rubber weather protector, and then taped the Edge cord to it very tightly. Then I carefully fished the Edge power cord back through the door weather protector to connect everything.

 

looking at floor carpet slightly pulled back next to plastic interior panel
Next, you route the power cord through all the panels and other things to get it where it needs to go.

In a van, you either end up going under the carpet the whole way, or you’d drop the headliner or some other weird things. It’s not particularly fun, and it’s slow going. But you can make it work.

 

closeup view through other wiring of the fuse panel
Edge includes a fuse tap to power the camera, both in the standard and micro fuse sizes.

Figure out which your fuse box is, find an empty space that is powered with IGN, and you’re off to the races. Or something. Don’t forget a good ground for the ground wire side of the cable!

The only other connection is the video plug that goes directly into the back of the Insight unit. You’ll note that back in the unboxed photo there was a right-angle connector that can be used if your Insight display is in a space where the video cable can’t stick straight out of the back.

 

closeup of camera portion of license plate frame
Here’s the final installed product. It looks really unobtrusive.

You can also see it includes infrared LEDs to help with nighttime visibility.

 

photo of Edge Insight CTS2 display showing the backup camera picture
Here’s a picture of the Edge Insight CTS2 displaying the backup camera.

Look, it’s not a 4K cinema-rated video camera. It’s a backup camera. It will help you see when you are going to hit things. It’s not supposed to make you the next Instagram star. You’ll also notice that, because the van license plate is offset to the passenger side, the trailer hitch is not directly centered in the camera view. Lastly, the backup view is inverted. The hitch is actually to the right of the camera in real life. It really isn’t as bad as it looks. In fact, it’s quite easy to use it to back up and get the hitch right where it needs to be.

The other cool thing is that the Insight monitor basically knew immediately that the backup camera was attached. On the van, the Insight can read the automatic transmission position from the OBD2 bus, and thus it gives you some setting options for how long the vehicle should be in reverse before it displays the camera. You can also tell it to turn the camera on for a few seconds when the Insight first powers up.

If you had a manual transmission vehicle, you can simply press the left edge of the touch screen display and this will change to the camera view, just like it was any other layout.

2 comments

    1. Yeah I realized I forgot to blur some of them a little bit late, and the way our photo system is set up I can’t delete photos, and it’s not hard for someone to just go to the whole photo gallery, so even if I added new blurred photos the old ones would still be there for now, so I just left them.

      Thanks for noticing, though! =)

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