As I’m due to tow horses for this years show season I thought it would be a good idea to have a camera in the trailer and monitor in the car so I can see how the horse is doing. I looked at off the shelf systems but they were all £100 plus and a lot weren’t wireless and required a constant power supply for the camera in the trailer. So it got me thinking that maybe I could knock something utilising my used pi zero’s. Project brief My idea is to use a pi zero enclosed in a monitor case and connected to it via it’s ‘TV’ pads and all powered via 5v. The camera end will again be a pi zero in some sort of enclosure running off a usb battery bank.

As per my previous monitor project I purchased the same one from amazon the difference this time is that I will be placing a PiZero inside it!

I again purchased the monitor form Amazon

After opening it up I found it was similar to the previous version I had bought.

I did a test placement of the PiZero to ensure everything was going to fit.

Next up was soldering 2 wires to the TV header.

I did a quick test just to ensure the TV wires were working correctly.

As I wanted to keep everything compact I had to figure out a way to get network connectivity within the confines of the monitor casing and due to the nature of the project wireless was a must. I found a spare Edimax EW-7811Un N150 Wireless USB Adapter and though I would utilise the Pi’s existing power and usb data pins. (As this uses the pins of the existing micro usb port it means you will no longer be able to use it i.e with 2 devices attached.)

I started by using a pair of long nose pliers to carefully open the gold part at the join, remove the inner white plastic part, open further and remove from the rest of the device.

I then soldered the bare ‘pads’ on the Edimax to the Pi. I’m afraid for some reason I didn’t get any pictures while doing this part however it’s basically soldering from the Pi power/ground and usb data pads to to the Edimax.

P1 V+

P23 Usb data

P22 Usb data

P6 Ground

(The extra red and black wire come later)

Next I de-soldered the yellow RCA wire from the monitor and soldered the one from the pi ‘TV’

I then added a second black wire form P6 on the pi and soldered it to the black wire on the monitor board. I also de-soldered the red wire.

I used the same method as before to Identify 5v on the monitor which I soldered one end to the chip and the other to P1 on the Pi with the red wire from the monitor board in the middle, to make it a bit clearer…

Pi P1 > Red wire desoldered from monitor board then from these two to the 5v on the chip.

That’s all the internal wiring done, I put some electircal tape on the silver plate to prevent any shorts and then placed the Pi on top (You will need to place the pi quite close to the monitor board otherwise the buttons on the back of the monitor won’t depress fully.)

Next up I added a USB connector to the end of the monitor wiring loom then it’s simply a case of plugging into a usb port (I used a usb power bank which can provide 5v @ 1A I haven’t tried it on a 500ma PC usb port yet.) which in turn powers the monitor and the Pi.