This morning I fitted the camera to the central blanking plug in the boot lid. I spent a couple of hours re-measuring and offering up before committing myself and drilling the holes. Fortunately, last year I marked the outside of the plug with where the webs were inside.
Today I decided on the best positions, so the stainless M3 nuts, washers and 8mm long screws, AND the camera lead (6mm hole) miss the webs without stress, and the camera points in the right direction. Here the superb sealant/glue is curing for a few more hours before the final installation tomorrow. That little 5gm tube has lasted really well, and done four other minor jobs in the last month. It may say “Fast!” but it’s actually 24-48hours depending on humidity and temperature…
A dry day, no wind, and I thought not too cold to be messing around outside, so I finally adjusted the parking markers on the Alpine for the new camera.
After taking ages fiddling about swapping menu views between a) reverse selected for a pic, and b) marker guess-adjust without pic, by using the tiny tap-tap-tap steps on screen I took the snap.
Alpine screen is only 625 line PAL standard definition, so the aliasing makes it looks quite pixelated on the “hi-res” phone camera, but by then with cold hands I didn’t care, they were near enough, and the new-camera’s image (full 1080p HD sensor and thus nicely oversampled for miserly SD) is so very much better than that from the 525line NTSC radio-linked Garmin.
Having tidied up, and now with a coffee warming my cold hands, only then did I dig around in my memory and dimly recall from months ago seeing new-camera pic and adjusting the markers simultaneously, BUT only if the Alpine thought it was an Aux camera and not a Direct camera. And yes it does work nicely then, but I’m not starting all over again today.
Oh Well.
Next time, it will be in a nice big car park with proper road markings on another empty bay behind the car.
I’ve been playing with different reversing lamp bulbs because the incandescent one the car came with was pants.
I had a couple left over from Niseko experiments (two in each pack but only one used), and the best one of those went in a month ago. A few days ago it failed while I was playing with reversing camera markers. I think it overheated from being on for too long, and shut down permanently. But its brother in the Niseko lasted a couple of years.
So I bought another pair of LEDs, slightly smaller too. The new LED in the car is much brighter! And hotter, given enough time. Even though the same make (Aglint) as the failed one, the only real worry I have (given its light intermittent usage) is it might drop out of the socket!
LEDS are just the job for reversing lamps. Best for reversing rather than blinding me with those bloody headlamps!
I’ve used them in my TT and failure rate is high. I think the style of bulb doesn’t suite the format. This will be sorted and a decent illumination whilst reversing is a good thing just around the corner I’m hoping.
That bulb runs at 7 watts for a claimed 1100 lumen (157 lumen per watt, really?) when cool, and drops to 4.5W when hot, at 110C!
The Osram LED T15 only runs at 2.9W for 280 lumen but they reckon about 4000 hours life. It is reasonably efficient at a much more typical 100 lumen per Watt.
An Osram incandescent T15 runs at 16Watt for 190 lumen and 1000 hours life.
When I was designing LED illumination schemes all the major chip manufacturers quoted ~30,000 hours life to half brightness at a mounting temperature of 50C. They varied at 100C but by then expected life was closer to tens of hours.
I found this holds true with domestic lighting; this house has been almost completely LED lit since 2009. But while lifespan can be longer than incandescent or fluorescent they definitely don’t last forever. Very few elements here are the original LED bulbs or LED strips now.
I too replaced all our domestic bulbs with LED long ago and no, they definitely don’t last for ever.
I also replaced reversing lamp bulbs with LEDs in both my Miyako and my 3 series.
The Miyako was really successful with much brighter light. However, the 3 series twin LEDs have been disappointing with much less improvement.
I suspect the bulbs I used just don’t suit the small apertures in the light clusters.
