Hardwired Dashcam to HomeLink Mirror

After having a window of a golf cart come flying at me on the highway a couple of weeks ago I decided I needed to get a dash cam. I decided on the Street Guardian SG9665GC capacitor model with GPS. Check out Dashcamtalk.com for a lot of reviews and forums on all the different types of cams available.

Since I have the Homelink mirror I decided I wanted to tap into the power there rather than trying to run down to the fuses.

I ordered a 12V to 5V converter with mini USB plug and an inline 3A fuse from Amazon.



Mine ended up having a spade type connector on the black/ground already. I soldered a small pin onto the red wire and covered with heat shrink wrap.




Pulling down the small black cover from the mirror exposed the connector for the mirror. Red is constant power, beige is switched power (only on when the car is on), and black/white is ground.




So it was as easy as pushing the pin I had soldered onto the red wire here into the slot with the beige wire (switched power).




I then used an extra bolt I had laying around and attached the black ground wire to that.




There is a decent amount of room in the compartment behind the mirror/sun glass holder. But with all the extra wire it was still a snug fit to get everything in there.






So once getting everything tucked up under the cover I set up the mounting plate for the camera, as well as the included wire cover bases. The camera is just hanging at the moment with the power wire and GPS wire attached. You can see the GPS in the background on passenger side. I tucked the GPS wire in the headliner on the passenger side.





The location of the GPS unit.



***The GPS unit was designed to sit on the dash, but I wanted to mount it up high. This required opening the unit up and just flipping the receiver so it would be pointed skyward when mounted on the windshield. Works perfectly.




View of the camera from the passenger side-







Hidden behind mirror when driving.





The view from the outside -





It is a pretty discreet camera and hard to see from the outside. You can make out an upside down T to the right of the mirror mount, this is from the tape used in the black dot area. Other than that it's pretty well hidden. I still need to swap out the white velcro on my EZpass, which you can see on the left side of the mirror, to make that less noticeable as well.

Overall it was a pretty easy install, and should be very easy to remove the wiring if ever needed. Good luck with your install if you choose to do it.

Hopefully since I now have a dashcam nothing exciting happens to me again!

 

I believe about 4 - 4.5 hours with the 32GB card that came with the cam. It can support a 64GB card though. It is Full HD 1080P at 30fps @ 15Mbit/sec.

Once it's full it will just record over the previously stored files unless you specifically locked them (or had an accident).

 

It uses a 3M adhesive double sided tape, so it goes right over the dots with no problem and stays put.

 

Probably too late with this answer, but the pin was bought on amazon /SUNKEE-Break-Away-Header-Straight/dp/B00C0Q5XZ4 $6.50 for 40 of them. The black plastic is pretty fragile though and breaks easily when trying to pull them apart.

The reason I used the inline fuse was for peace of mind, I didn't want to potentially take out the expensive mirror if something happened due to the camera. But you are correct there should be a fuse for the mirror.

Good luck