GPS and rear view camera mirror mod

I've just fitted a Chinese GPS mirror and am really quite impressed with it. It fits directly to the Prius bonded-on mirror mount in a couple of minutes and was pretty easy to wire up. It runs Windows CE, and comes with iGo8 nav software, but I've found that it runs TomTom perfectly well.

Here's a picture of it installed and running TomTom:



The mirror has a multicore cable that can be run down the windscreen pillar (behind the curtain airbag for safety) to the drivers side footwell. The multicore cable terminates in a small box with three phono sockets for video inputs, plus the power leads and an aerial for transmitting MP3 audio (and the audio from videos) to the FM radio. I found that this box, wrapped in thin foam, fitted easily behind the trim panel next to your foot (this pulls off easily, after a plastic nut at the front top corner has been undone.

I ran a +12V feed from the battery to the fused +ve Batt lead on the box, under the door sill trim. I ran the video cable from the rear view camera (a 09 Toyota Camry item from eBay that fits the cut out in the hatch back perfectly) along the sill as well, and found that the supplied video camera cable was plenty long enough to reach this location.

Fitting the camera was a pain and has been described by others. Suffice to say that I followed the instructions in this thread: http://priuschat.com/forums/gen-iii...21-new-camera-install-cheap-ebay-cameras.html (this is exactly the same camera as I used) and also this thread: http://priuschat.com/forums/gen-iii...8790-new-install-jvc-gps-replaced-jbl-hu.html

The GPS mirror can be purchased from several vendors, but I bought mine from this chap in Australia: Brash Imports His service was excellent, he even made sure that my mirror was supplied with a full set of maps of Europe on the IGo8 nav software.

The only slight glitch is that the mirror takes about 5 seconds to detect and switch to the reversing camera video input. Against that, the GPS locks very quickly indeed, much, much faster than any previous nav system I've owned. I really enjoy having an integrated TomTom nav solution, as it's so much more intuitive to use than the OEM nav systems I've seen.

Jeremy