Słomkowski's technical musings

Playing with software, hardware and touching the sky with a paraglider and amateur radio as SP3OHM.

Removing parking guidelines from Chinese rearview camera

A simple modification of a cheap Chinese rearview camera that stops it from drawing parking guidelines over the image.

For one project I bought several rearview cameras from AliExpress, the ones shown in the photos. They are cheap, waterproof and provide a wide viewing angle. They output a composite video signal, which can be displayed on any analog TV or grabbed by a USB frame grabber. However, they overlay the output image with parking guidelines. That is a major drawback for non-automotive uses.

The rearview camera with four white LEDs and RCA video output.

Fortunately, the camera is easy to modify so that it doesn’t draw the lines. The housing is glued, so you have to pry it open to get to the PCB. The biggest (relatively speaking) chip on the board seems to be the EEPROM, which stores the camera’s configuration and probably the guidelines as well. The EEPROM has the standard pinout (source):

Pinout of an 8-pin I²C EEPROM.

The way to disable the guidelines is to connect pins 5 and 6 with each other. Whatever protocol they actually carry (true I²C or some other serial protocol), shorting them disrupts the communication, and the camera falls back to its default mode, which has no guidelines. I simply soldered two pins together as shown in the photos.

The camera opened and two EEPROM pins connected.
A better view of the connected EEPROM pins.

Remember to glue the housing back together if you need the camera to stay waterproof.