How do the cameras connect to the infotainment? I want to relocate one

I have a 22 tundra I have an overlanding camper with starlink and a small computer that controls a wifi and media server.

The camper blocks the camera for the rear view mirror, so I want to take the headliner out and reroute the wires to the rear of the camper. I'll probably buy a new camera to avoid messing with the water proofing.
While I'm in there I'll also run the GPS antenna wire to a 7 antenna array I have next to the starling.

What I want to know before I go poking and probably screw up is how the cameras connect and if adding another 25ft of cat5 ethernet spliced into the harness will do the job.

While I'm at it, I've been thinking of putting two cameras on the roof, but I just realized the car already has 6 cameras. Does anyone know the technical details on the cameras? Is it just canbus transmitting the frames that theres a reasonable chance to tap into, or is it some unique bus that I have no hope converting the video stream into one a NVR can view.

Thanks for any info to continue to build out my backcountry batmobile

 

@GG.Offroad has a camera extension harness for sale that works well. You connect it to the bed camera above the headliner and route the harness under the truck to the bed...

You can't extend the camera wire by yourself without pre-made shielded cable, it has to be shielded and no splices...

Rear this thread https://www.tundras.com/threads/2022-topper-canopy-shell.106861/page-15#post-3118632

https://www.ggoffroad.com/store

 

Thanks, that's a great solution. hopefully someone can share details on the protocol these cameras send the video stream over the wire because I would realy love to be able to use the cameras in the AI NVR I have running in the truck comptuer

I guess the camera are powered off when the car is off, so maybe they won't be useful for my needs anyway.

 

I'm a security camera guy myself...

I don't think anybody knows what kind of protocol these cameras are using yet. Or at least nobody took the time to try figure it out.

You can't just cut open the cable and connect it to a dvr... Or at least nobody tried yet. Someone tried to cut open the camera cable and extend it but that didn't work. Cable must be shielded with good connections so no signal loss. It's unknown what kind of power these cameras need either.

It's probably some sort of digital HD signal. Not sure if it's regular TVI... Could be proprietary digital signal. We don't even know what brand these cameras are or who makes it. Lcd/headend is made by panasonic, cameras plug in directly into it... but that's all we know.

I actually do have the rear bed camera still available as I didn't come up with good way to mount it into my camper shell yet. So I could technically try to connect it to the TVI dvr, but I don't have the special harness connectors these cameras use to try splicing the cable. This test would have told us if cameras use common tvi HD protocol, if they're not, then it's proprietary digital protocol and it'll be impossible to connect it to any other dvr recorder

 

The harness is 4 pin, so I bet 2 are 12v and the other 2 are data. If I can find a diagram of the harness to see where they all plug into, that could get me closer to guessing how they communicate

If I'm right about them all being 12v powered, I'll confirm with a multi meter once I have time to pull down the headliner, then I can just isolate their power from the vehicle and power them from my camper battery bank and turn them into a security system. Assuming the protocol can be transcoded in a raspberry pi and maybe a dongle of some sort

 

The video is definitely not over CAN. CAN is such a bloated protocol on a slow bus and meant for small packets. Larger files can only be sent in 8 byte chunks. Point is, video isn't sent over this.

NVR systems are meant for IP-based cameras using full ethernet. Even with H265 compression they have a ton of latency, rendering them useless for auto applications.

Was going to ask pin count but you already supplied that. My gut reaction was single pair ethernet but I also know there are camera suppliers who have proprietary systems with lowest possible latency. It'd be useful to throw a scope on the conductors to start getting an idea.

Spitballing, and let's say it is SPE with a power pair, RPi products don't have any SPE phys on board. You'd have to build a HAT with SPI-driven transceiver/controller. Not impossible, as I've contemplated it for integration with other projects, but they're not for a hobby and the faint of heart.

Keep this thread updated with what you learn.

 

Yeah it will be a while before I tackle this even for initial investigation. I'm learing about CAN because the 12 distribution and charging system I have talks over CANBUS so I'm getting power stats and trying to control each 12v output via MQTT. So that will be my priority, hopefully some car genius runs across this thread and has the answers.

I will hit a dead end if they use a "standard" protocol that hasn't already been used in a pi hat or other SBC

Any geniuses or disgruntled Toyota engineers please DM me

 

Not quite following your hop here from the camera to presumably a bunch of CAN-controlled relays on a DC power system.

Integrating CAN is straightforward. I, and others on the forum, have dual channel cards in our trucks being used for message modification. Also, MQTT is a very basic message protocol with lots of support. The only catch is if you're going to use an internet-hosted broker (will require an LTE modem) or one local to the truck.

 

I was just musing about how hacking the vehicle cameras isn't something I'll try soon other than moving them because I have to teach myself about CAN from scratch for something more immediately useful to me.
I do have a local mqtt broker running in the truck with a HomeAssistant/nodered instance that will do things like turn all power aux off if my phone is disconnected from the wifi network for 5 minutes, it already locks the doors via toyota API.

I'll update if I incidentally find out more about the cameras, because having 4 stealth/integrated camera for a 360 view instead of two protruding cameras on top of the camper is highly useful to me.

 

I'm not quite following all of this talk about CAN or raspberry pi...

You guys seem to over complicate things and talking about something else.

It's simple - these cameras send digital video signal to the panasonic headend unit in the front.

These are not ip network cameras. So first thing you'd need is a device (encoder) that can capture the digital video signal from these cameras and convert it to ip video signal (such as onvif generic format)... Then any dvr nvr or computer can be setup to record it.

 

I was just describing another project in the same vehicle which uses the CANBUS for communication between the Battery and 12v switching relay that I'm reverse engineering, and since I'm new to CANBUS, I was guessing the toyota side used CAN for the cameras. When it became clear in this thread the cameras are not CAN, I won't have time to see if they can be hacked until I fixup my primary project first, which is in it's infancy.

I'm just hoping the cameras use a protocol that is common, like CAN is, which could make it possible to transcode and re-stream each into my AI NVR using a raspberry PI, as you said.

I just had a bike stolen out of the back of my truck, and I didn't remember the action camera until it had over-written the parked recordings that day, so I'm just imagining how cool it would be to have a) the same person detection I have at home to send me a push notification if someone is around my truck for more than 2 minutes with their picture, and B) Send me an alert if there's a Bear or Moose outside while I'm sleeping in the camper.

 

That's clear.

We aren't.

The objective is to do just this - read and decode the video stream to something the OP can use.


@GrapeCent - what does your system look like so far and how far have you implemented it?

 

Following. I pull a travel trailer and would love to be able to connect the backup camera that I use on the trailer, and be able to view that image on my console rather than having to use the wireless monitor that came with the camera.

 

If there is an Android app that allows you to see the camera then you could get the Android Auto dongle and plug that into your USB.

$50 Motorola Sound MA1, The Only Google Authorized Wireless Android Auto Car Adapter, Smartphone to Screen Wireless Bridge Car Accessories, USB Type-A

Like this one. It would probably lag some.

 

at the moment I'm just getting warmed up, but I have a starlink rv dish and a LTE antenna/router hooked upto a 200AH battery/inverter installed in a ROAM box. In the box is a glorified raspberry Pi (specifically a linkstar h68k) that is a router and docker host for failover between LTE and starlink, and runs HomeAssistant as well as two Seeed studio CANBUSto usb adapters.

So I've got plenty of capability to process the video in the vehicle and view it on my phone, when that can be discovered. But I haven't done more to the factory car than order the camera extension cables yesterday. Too new to canbus to jump into a $70k tinker project, but it would be cool if I can eventually lock the doors and honk the horn when people get too close for too long.

@charrito maybe get 3 kits of the camera extension cables mentioned above and daisy chain them with silicon tape and an outdoor plug cover for the section that is between the hitch and the trailer tongue. You would just need to move the cameras back to the rear of your cap and plug them in there when you're not towing.

 

Neat. Was questioning why not just use the LTE gateway as your route source but the Linkstar running Docker is clutch for what you're doing. I get how you have a broker on-board now without a compute source running Mosquitto. Reverse engineering the CAN messages for lock and horn control should be pretty straightforward using Python/can-utils/socketcan and its sniffer. I'd consider some IP cameras to get the system laid out and begin on their implementation before trying to utilize the OEM cams. Will probably be a huge time saver, and as these aren't mission-critical feeds while driving, it'd be alright for now; especially considering that your setup (currently) is meant for full ethernet.

 

My plan is to turn this into a submersible Ican control with a Logitech game pad

 

doesn’t work unfortunately. The OG gg.off-road kits (first protos) were 2 sets of cords to get the proper length and the video clipped in and out constantly. The single cord with sheath doesn’t do this

 

What quality of connectors were used when they were daisy-chained? I would've tried some gold plated Deutsch DTMs with solid pin and sockets to minimize impedance. Also, were the sheaths chained?

 

So I've been looking at vehicle cameras and something hit me that they're always analog, and since the cameras are 2 pin for signal and 2 for power, they're highly likely to be analog and not digital.

If true, this makes the prospect extremely promising, as I'll just need a series of analog video inputs for the small computer, however I'll probably spring for a dedicated rpi since video transcoding is performance intensive, as well as processing the video for AI NVR. The resolution on the infotainment makes me think they are 480p, so may not really be too cpu bound afterall.

Also, just as a funny haha thought, I could connect video output from any analog device and play Doom on the front camera view. "OH those are children? I thought they were zombies"

This is easy and cheap enought I think I can try without a large investment, so I'll update if I get a positive result with my hypothesis.