I’ve had a dash cam on my car since 2019. It was a cheapy one I got on amazon for like $40. I think I spend another few shekels on a mount. It worked well until this year when the internal battery crapped out. No clue how to get one of those. What it was doing was losing the date. So every day is 1/1/80 or something like that. Still recorded though.
Time to trade up. So I got a BotsLab G980H. I wanted a better one and one that would record the rear. Mobile integration was a plus. It’s a pain in the ass to pop the mini-SD and bring it to your laptop to harvest vidyas. The big question was would the rear wire be long enough.
It’s a big truck.
Turns out it was. Installation was easy. It has two static stickers that go between the camera’s sticky pad and the windshield. Nice touch, since it’ll prevent the thing attaching permanently to your glass.
The front was a challenge seeing that I didn’t want it in the middle of the windshield like the showed.
It swivels up and down, but not sideways. Still , it has a wider view and higher rez than the old one. The rear was similar:
Getting the wires under the dash was no big deal. They easily hid in the trim. I came down the passenger side where the glove box swivels down, leaving plenty of access to the wiring. There’s a panel that comes off the lower dash where I put in a 12V (lighter) plug.
Why?
Because both receptacles in the dash are battery, not switched. 12V, 24×7. No good for a camera. I simply plugged the old one in when I started the truck. This time I was going to tap into the switched feed to the compressor for the rear air bags. Luckily, under the steering wheel there’s a huge access panel:
Look at that mess.
The purple and pink are from the radio, not used. They are for switching the backup cam I didn’t install. The red, yellow and the rest are the trailer brakes and the compressor. I need to remove the trailer brakes. I’ll never tow anything that needs them. I spent way too much time poking around trying to figure out where they all go. The big yellow one is the compressor feed.
Wiring was simple. Except the piece of crap adaptor I bought from AutoZone shorted out as soon as it was plugged in. I fixed a glaring design defect. No idea what the thought process was to have ‘wings’ on the hot lead that hit the case ground when you plugged it in. I took it apart, cut them off, and put it back.
Then tucked all the birds nest wiring back into where it was. I deal with it later.
Then, the fun started. The camera connected to Bluetooth right away. No issues. But, it also uses WiFi. But it conflicts with Apple CarPlay. Support was mostly useless. The general answer from the interwebs was to disable CarPlay when you need to attach with the app.
Fine.
I can attach fine if I plugged it into the existing adaptors. I think what I’ll do is install a switch to to toggle between battery and switched.
There is a way to hook it up to both so it monitors your car while it’s off. I may look into that.
Next up for the hoopty is to figure out where the airbags are leaking. Those, I want to keep. easy enough to troubleshoot. The compressor is behind a panel at the rear, where the rear climate fan is located. Couple squirts of soapy water will do it.
Inspected By Pat 