I’ve always thought that the RX8 could benefit from having a reversing camera as standard, and a lot of people on the forum have already done it as a mod. I wanted to do this as well – but then my wife went and beached the front air dam on one of those concrete wheel-stops in the local supermarket car park, so I decided to add a front camera as well. The rear camera is mounted in the rear boot-lid lock housing (nothing unusual there) and the front camera sits behind/within the front rotary accent. Both cameras were purchased off eBay for about $20 each. The mirror monitor is a common garden-variety wired unit, also bought off eBay for about $110. The video switcher is a home brew design mounted in the boot, and cost about $30 to build. I bought an OEM DSC switch, mounted it in the single empty switch position and relabelled it – this allows the front camera to be switched on whenever the ignition is on, however the video switcher design ensures that the reverse camera has priority; in other words, the front camera can be switched on/off at any time EXCEPT when reversing, when the rear camera is automatically activated. I also added an auxiliary video output to allow video recording to a laptop. I've added a few photos of the finished mod - you can see some of my wife's handiwork on the bottom of the air dam.

Here is an edited video from the front camera. The sound comes from an old tie-clip mic I had, mounted in the engine bay. (For those of you in Brisbane, you’d probably recognise it as the Samford to Mt Nebo loop and returning through The Gap and Keperra, starting from the Ferny Grove train station - only 5 minutes worth, not the full drive.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-LQXat6G1c

 

Very impressive!!!

You should consider a short DIY of this.

 

Wow, the cost is just incredibly cheap. If I were to get it installed from a store, they'd prob cost me 500+ dollars at least. What kinda screen do you have?

 

very nice...but the camera being a little sidways in the video threw me off a little bit...but once again very nice job

 

I forgot to mention that the OEM DSC switch was $45 from my local Mazda dealership, so that was actually the second-most expensive component after the monitor. I’m not too sure what brand the monitor is (I don’t have the box it came in any more) but I think it was an Eonon – a Chinese cheapie I bought from a vendor in HK. It appears to work quite well. And yes, I know the front camera is angled off by a few degrees – gotta fix that when I get sufficiently annoyed by it. As for the DIY – I’m working on a new video switcher design now. My aim will be to include ambient-light sensed switching of a set of high intensity IR LEDs at both the front and rear – for the rear, I want to put them in a couple of the diamond-shaped grill wells either side of the rear accent, and cover them with optically-opaque but IR-transparent perspex. Call it version 2.0.

 

fix the angle and you can shoot your own le rendezvous.

 

we demand a DIY. impressive job. well done mate

 

Great job! I'd be a little worried about the front camera being taken out by a rock. Maybe a piece of plexiglass cut to fit the rotary accent for protection?

How did you relabel the switch?

 

The switch label is just a laser print on normal paper, glued onto a backing piece of transparent red plastic - the stuff used to make overhead projector presentations. (I don't know what it is...acrylic? Dunno, but I had a few pages of the stuff left over from my teaching days.) The paper/plastic label was then sprayed with clear to seal it, but it came out looking more glossy than I wanted. Then it was just a matter of ripping off the DSC label and sticking the new one in place. I'm planning on version 2 having more functionality - at the moment, pressing the button switches the front camera on or off, but what I want to do is have a single long press of the button (say 2 seconds) activate the rear camera regardless of whether you're in reverse gear or not. I'd like to be able to have other things like additional selectable cameras, but unfortunately there is not a lot you can design a system to do using a single momentary push button.