It’s Plug and Play!
“It’s plug and play!”
So said Emerald Integrations, the designers of this exotic product for my customer’s Audi Q5, a rear view camera fitted into a replacement rear hatch opener that is a perfect replica of the factory hatch handle. Can I install this? Sure, plug and play, must integrate with the CAN bus I suppose, all I have to do is what . . . take apart the hatch to mount the camera and take apart the dash to plug it in. And then put it all back together.
But it wasn’t plug and play at all.
Like every other rear view camera I’ve ever installed, there was a wire to connect to the backup lamp and there was a wire to connect the module in the dash to the display screen and there was a wire to connect to the vehicle’s accessory 12V line and ground. No problem, I know how to do all that. And I did.
But there was a problem. After I’d gotten everything connected and put the hatch back together (picture me bent over backwards, holding a plastic frame about the size of a bathtub, over my head, aligning and fastening 20 plastic pop fasteners, over and over again, until they were all lined up right and in their respective holes), and fitted the interface in the dash (not a millimeter to spare!), I tested it and the video looked pretty good.
But a couple hours after the customer drove away, he called and informed me that the video had deteriorated to noise and then a blank screen after running the engine for a few minutes. I told him to come back the next day and I’d see if I’d made a mistake.
Well he did, but I hadn’t, as far as I could tell. I did observe the problem though, and it looked to me like a defect in the interface. I suggested he call the mfgr and see what they’d do for him. He emailed me the next day and reported that they told him I shouldn’t have tapped into the windshield wiper fuse for the 12V accessory feed because it was “getting too much power” to the module. Right. And, they told him sometimes the CAN bus caused the interference, and you had to use the backup lamp 12V to signal when the vehicle was in reverse. That sounded more like it. I had him come in the next Sat to have me rewire it that way.
Well he did, and I did, but it didn’t help. The instructions that came with the unit indicated that the programming had to be changed with the supplied remote control (!) but I couldn’t get it to work. We had to jump through several hoops, some of them with flames, to get a tech on the line on a Saturday, but he came through, and as it turned out, the instructions were written wrong. OK, I can deal with that. Once I had the correct process (turn around three times, spit on the ground, throw salt over left shoulder, etc.), I was able to change the program, and voila! the picture still broke down after a minute or two of running the engine.
What else could it be? What else could it be??? Long shot, but I thought maybe, just maybe, it was the vehicle’s backup lamp that was creating the interference. So I disconnected the camera from the lamp and ran an extra wire from the back of the vehicle to the front and connected the camera to . . . yep, that nasty windshield wiper fuse, the one they said was “too powerful”.
Heh. Worked like a champ.
