BRP Trip: Installing Cameras on the Harleys

Welcome to Ride & Rally with Fix my Hog. Charlie and I are crazy excited for the trip. And one of the things that we're doing to capture stuff for you and for us, is we are putting cameras on the bikes. This is a really cool system. We've already got it on mine.

Tonight we're gonna put it on Charlie's. And there's a front mount camera and a rear mount camera. It's an Innovv system. I hope I'm saying that right. The Innovv K3.

And pretty simple to put on. We learned from this, it's gonna record front and rear all the time, and even earmarks the files as F and R. So you know which camera that image, that video, came from. So enough about that. Let's have a look at Charlie's bike.

First thing that we're gonna do is get it up on the, what's that thing called? Mount, rack? Lift. Lift. We're gonna get it on the lift, and then we're gonna work on it.

To install this, there are a handful of things going on. We've got some components. There's a DVR, which is just what it sounds like. This is a DVR that also accepts an SD card. And then you can of course remove that card to look at the files that you're recording.

There are two cameras. One's got a long cord, one's got a short cord. And so you're gonna have to look at where's the DVR going on your bike, and that's what's gonna control which camera you use going that way and that way, 'cause the tether cord has to be able to get there. There's a GPS. That has to get mounted someplace.

And on my bike, we put it on the back of the trunk. On the bottom of the trunk. The trunk always stays on my bike. So the camera and the GPS are mounted there. Charlie frequently removes his trunk when he's out riding by himself.

So we're working on a different system there. And then this component, this is the power unit, that's gonna end up under the seat. This is easy peasy. It connects to the battery, and the yellow lead goes to a power source that's gonna be on only when the key is on. So this part is easy.

The instructions for this thing are good. The challenge is really like, where are you threading wire to keep everything neat? And then how are you gonna mount the components onto your particular bike? It's gonna be idiosyncratic to your bike. But we'll show you what we're gonna do here.

For the front here, Charlie has got a pretty easy mounting spot. It's gonna go right on the bottom of that faring. Got a little right angle attachment on the drill so we can punch that hole. And then it comes with mounting brackets that work really, really, really well. So that's gonna just simply, just like that.

Simple bolt right to the bearing like that. Do a little handheld camera work and get you caught up. That front camera is mounted. That's bolted in place, and we are putting Loctite on every bolt that we use to mount this thing. Then on the handlebars, a component I did not show you earlier is a remote.

So what happens as you're driving is if you press that button, it bookmarks the video file in that particular location, so it's easier to find later when you wanna call it back up. And then here, wires are routed under there and then the power source is there. So that's very easy. We've got a black to negative, a red to positive. The yellow goes to a circuit on the bike that is only hot when the bike is on.

And then Charlie does have the camera on the rear. That worked out really well, that mount. And then right now we're getting all the wires to this side and they're gonna end up, the DVR itself is gonna live in the bag on this side. We got the DVR mounted in the bag, and there's a side on this that you have access to a micro SD card on. So we've got that side up.

Yeah, right there. And it's just double-face tape holding that in, which is gonna work great. Final connection is really, really easy. Everything is color-coded. So black to black, orange to orange.

Black to black orange to orange. There's two blacks here. Yeah, it's just your cameras, I think-- Front and rear. If it's backwards, reverse your black to black. Yeah, if your file is showing F on what's actually your R camera, then switch those two leads.

So this final connection is really simple. Charlie's doing a little wire maintenance with zip ties and neatness counts. Big picture, here's what we've got. The remote is up here on the handlebar. You have to have easy access to that and we'll talk about it in a second again.

And then front camera, then power supply is here. The GPS we chose to just put in the bag. It's in the bottom of the bag. You can't let the GPS wire cross the microphone wire. Haven't talked about the mic yet.

The DVR is double-face taped right inside the bag, and then rear camera. So here's the deal with this that's so cool. When Charlie gets on the bike, when I get on my bike and you get going, it instantly recognizes that, and it automatically starts recording. We're gonna run a 256-gig card in the DVR and it'll record for up to 19 hours on that. And if you get to the end of that 19 hours and you haven't done anything with the footage, it'll just start overriding it.

It'll just keep going. While you're riding, I mentioned this earlier, if you see something cool, so like when we cross the Mississippi River or whatever in the trip, when you press the button on the remote, it's gonna earmark. It's gonna bookmark that file. So it'll be easier to find later out of your gazillion hours of footage. On the video footage it says time, latitude and longitude, and your speed.

Maybe that's fast for Charlie but it gives you a bunch of data on there. So for a trip like this, it's gonna be cool, because obviously we're gonna be showing you stuff on the trip and we're gonna lean on this footage for it. But even if you're just a hobbyist biker it's pretty cool that this doesn't require any maintenance or on/off, it's gonna always record. So if you forget to do anything with it, but you do a really cool trip, when you get back, that footage is gonna be there for you. So it's a very neat system, I think overall, and even after this trip, I think it's gonna be really fun to have on the bikes.

Simple install, like an hour net or so, right? Yep. And that's including us having to set up with the camera just a little bit. So not much involved to do it. It's more about just kind of dotting the I's and crossing the T's, threading the cables so that they're relatively invisible when you're done.

And other than that, pretty simple, good instructions. There's an app on the phone. And when we get to that point, we'll talk a little bit about that and how that coincides with this thing. Go a little bit handheld here again and Charlie's got the app open on his phone. So one of the things that lets you do is see what the camera sees.

That's the front camera. So using that, we were able to figure out should it be pitched up or down? The camera itself is round. So it doesn't need to be turned clockwise or counterclockwise to be straight. And we'll double-check that on the road as a test run before we do the trip, and you can do all that same stuff for the back camera.

And then-- So the back camera's here, front camera's the main screen. Yeah. So right now it's picture in a picture. But then you can also toggle back and forth between the two cameras to get each individual view. So we'll do that same setup check for the rear camera.

And then within the app are all your settings, such as how long do you want each file to be, and there are lots of parameters in there. Read the owner's manual and you'll get it. We decided to jump on the bikes and have a look at what the cameras are gonna bring for us and show you as well. Remember that as soon as you start the bike, recording starts, you don't have to control that. This is the view through the front mount camera on my bike.

120 degree lens. Same lens front and rear. So it's a tiny bit fish-eyed, but not bad. Now watch as I pass Charlie. In my editing software, I grab the folder, the file from the rear camera and brought that in.

So we get to see Charlie. And of course, if I grab the file from his bike, we'd be able to see me on his front camera. Look down in the lower left hand corner. There's a bunch of data there. How fast you're going, what day it is, what time it is, and your GPS coordinates.

This is gonna be very handy for keeping track of these files, the time and the date especially. The system comes with a microphone. So as we're driving, I'll be able to say, "Hey, look, there's Charlie. "Hey, look, there's a mountain." And then remember that button that's on the handlebar of the bike that came with the system. So if I push that button, it's gonna bookmark that file.

So that later when I want to find which particular video file did I talk on, it'll be very, very easy to locate. One thing we don't get from this is any kind of a side view. It's directly forward facing, directly rear facing. So the lack of a side view is a negative, but the overall positives from having this just do its thing all day every day, are far outweighing the negative. Gonna be a great addition for our trip.