I know this isn't really a pratical addon for our cars however....I bought 2 12V DC day/night cameras for my car. I am gonna mount one in the front and one in the back and have them hooked to my computer which has the ability to record video/take snapshots and so on. Also the video will be viewable on my 7.2" TFT Screen which is mounted on my dash.

What I was wondering is...the voltage is 12V DC, cars use 12V DC. Can I just wire these up directly to the battery with a 5amp fuse?

 

Personally I wouldn't recomend it! The problem is that the car's electrics aren't 12v they are actually about 10-14v ish, with the occasional 1kv spike.

Now, a lot of things will cope happily with being connected to this, especially if they have internal power supplies that take the 12v down to a lower voltage before using it.

What I did for my mp3 player box (which is a standard pc motherboard & disk in a small case) was that I took the car supply in filtered it and used a switching regulator to take the voltage down to 5V, then another to get -5V, and one to take the 5V back up to 12V for the disk drive. I knew that this was sensitive equipement and so I had to do something good. What I ended up with will actually take anything from 8v to 30v and has enough filtering to stop any problems. Perhaps a bit overkill for your application.

You'll need to supply more info as to what exactly you have and what it is labelled as for its power supplies? Does it have a spec like 12v +/-5% @ 5Amp, or does it have a mains power supply etc that has info on it?

Si. :lala:

 

you'll need a filtered voltage regulator of some sort.

but mini cams on cars are fun. http://josh.swoca.net/board/mrdude/Vid/