Digital Rear View Mirror

One problem with building out the interior of the van for camping adventure is it rather obstructs the rear view mirror for driving. But hey, this is 2024 so its possible to replace the 'analog' old school mirror with a rear facing camera and a digital lcd screen in the form of a mirror.

After a fair amount of research, settled on the Wolfbox G900 Pro mirror. It includes a front facing camera as well, 24x7 loop recording, a nice low-light Sony sensor, and has wifi. The wifi use case is us laying in bed and hearing 'the bear' outside the van. With minimal fuss, can grab the phone, connect to the mirror's wifi network, run the Wolfbox app, and see live streaming views from either camera. Once convinced it's just a fat chipmunk, sleep can return without ever leaving the warm bed.

Let's install the rear facing camera first. Where to mount it? Could try to get some magnet mount or fabricobble a rack mount, but that attracts attention and the appearance is kind of a wart. Something streamlined would be better. The Transit has a large upper rear brake light assembly that seems to have room and decent cabling access through the van roof already.

Removing the brake light, I'm able to find a spot and perform about 12 iterations of Dremel cutting & sanding and test fitting. To get the angle right on the camera needs some sort of shim behind and I explored 3D printing one for a while, but ultimately ended up with a layer of two of 3M VHB tape.

Not too shabby - almost looks factory. Did 2 test mounts of the entire assembly with a power test on the mirror to check the angle of the camera. Finally got it right and then added some black Sikaflex urethane sealant around it.

Second major task is replacing the Ford factory mirror with the digital mirror. It took a few attempts at various mounting arms and adapter plates, but after about 2 months of parts swapping back and forth with Amazon, finally got a mix that works without needing to pull out the Dremel and hack away at the plastic shroud on the front windshield that encloses the mirror mount.

Below is the two halves of a plastic shroud that hides all the cables and mounting plate for the factory mirror.

And the final installed look once everything is back together. It looks completely stock, but now has tons more functionality and value.