Topic: Problem with my Snakeeyes

[Z66 Butch]

Thanks for the info Butch.  Sounds like he is going to swap the bezels.  I'd rather not be without mine for a few days.  And I wonder if he wants to put one with a non-functional camera onto his AV.  Either way, I'm going to go with a new one, but thanks again for sharing.

OK, I did not know that your SnakeEyes camera was in the bezel.

[Main One]

Finally got my backup camera going again.

I bought another camera on ebay for about $60.  Chose the smallest one I could find.  Depth was an issue.  The snakeyes camera had very little depth, less than half an inch, the one I bought was a bit over an inch.

After trimming the wiring at the camera to splice in the new one, I found out that I wasn't getting power to the original camera.  I believe the s-video type connectors can only take some much winter road salt, etc, and were not up to surviving 2 winters, at least not where mine were located.  The original camera had taken on some moisture, so the picture was getting more and more blurry anyway.

The new camera does not have the fisheye type of picture that the snakeyes did, but that means it has a smaller field of view.  I had to use one of the adjustment rings that came with the camera to get it to look more down.  (I'll try to get pics up sometime - got to figure out how to do that with the new computer at home since the other one gave out.)

The new camera also has some IR LEDs integrated with it, to give it better night capability.  The LEDs primarily only light up the center of the camera field of view, so they are limted, but still, the original camera didn't have any.

As far as I can tell, picture quality is as good as the orginal camera, although it's not like I look at it for hours on end.

As suspected, even though the original camera had what looked a lot like an s-video connector, the system is working great with a composite video camera in the works.

For anyone else that runs into this, I'd suggest cutting off the original connectors, and doing some temporary splicing of the wiring to make sure that the problems you may be experiencing is not due to a bad connection.  I had tried cleaning the connectors as best I could, getting s-video cable to plug into the connector going to the front of the truck to make sure power was there, but had not tried tapping into the wiring past the last connector, which seemed to be where my problem really was.