After reading https://www.s2ki.com/forums/index.ph...c=469203&st=25 containing Tanquen's post. I decided to do the install myself since I didn't want anybody else tearing apart my car.


Tanquen's info on the VSS and e-brake wires made everything install smoothly. I couldn't find exactly what wire went to the reverse light so I decided to leave that for another day since I didn't have a rear camera installed and I was ready to be done.

My one real problem with my install is that the DIN slot seemed way too cramped when it came to mounting the unit with wires attached. I have never installed a radio before, but I had a very hard time geting the wires on the back of the unit in a position where I could still fit in the radio. I'm sure I wasn't doing it right, but it was late at night and I was finally able to get it into a place where I could stop so I figured I would get it up to 100% complete another day.

How do people lay the wires so there is enough room for the unit to push all the way back? Right now I kinda have them all jammed in the back, but I as I think about it now, it seems like I might be able to run them from the back up under the radio on the driver side, under the front to the passenger side and out the back. Any tricks or tips would be greatly appreciated. The way I have it now, I can't close the door without taking off the faceplate, but I know if I can just push the unit in another 1/16" I should have no trouble closing the door with the face on.


Side question: I installed the brake line on the brake cable, if I wanted to dissable this safety feature (I won't watch a movie while driving, but on long trips it would be nice to listen to a movie like an audiobook) do I just remove that wire and put it on a ground?


Thanks for the help.

Andrew

 

You actually have to modify that bracket to get the radio to sit back far enough to close the door with the face on. As for the wiring, you just have to play with it to get it back in there, which is hard because of the lack of accessibility to the rear of the unit. One thing you should plan on is running A/V extenders somehwere so you can hook up external sources without having to remove the radio and fish out those connectors. The wire for the e-brake just needs to be run to any ground for you to be able to watch movies with the ebrake down.

Hope this helps. There is a thread somewhere with pics for modifying the bracket.

 

yea, I linked that thread and did exactly that. I might need to take a little bit more off the brackets, but the problem I ran into was that I couldn't push the unit back far enough even if the brackets weren't even on. The unit would get stopped by the wires in the back. I even decided to take out the Amp output wires because I thought there would be no way in hell that I could get the unit back with those adding to the mess behind the unit.

I pushed the unit as far back as I could, but the brackets still had about 1/16th to go before they hit the mount. I just threaded the screws in and tightened it down hoping it would push the unit back, but it probably just bent back the mounts until they when flush to the mount.

I feel like there has got to be some place/method that people use to put all that wire back there that I"m not seeing because I just haven't found the room for it.


PS. I really hated taking off/on that front door to the radio, I want to do it just one more time and be done with it and have everything running correctly.

 

i am going to be taking mine out for repair, i will check to see if i can find a good way of putting it back in when i reinstall and let you know. Hit me up in a few days, i forget things alot.

 

thanks

 

Impressions one week later....


Ok I found some very anoying problems with this unit. If anyone has any methods/solutions I would be very apprecitave. Just a disclaimer to what I list below... Dispite everything I list, I'm still very pleased with the unit and am overall happy with it.

1. "Cannot operate this function while driving" appears whenever I'm moving and stops you from using about 1/2 the features of the unit. Everything from changing GPS end location to about 1/2 of the prefrences for the unit. Right now I could care less about my inability to play movies while driving, but I really really want to be able to change my destination or add side trips, or modify the route while driving.

2. GPS Directions are VERY POOR. To clairify... I can clearly follow the directions that the unit gives me, but the directions it gives are what I would expect from a 5 y/o reading a map and giving all the roads in a strait line. For example... my daily commute to work is about 20 miles. My GPS would have me driving about 15 miles instead of my 20, but it has me driving 10 miles down a very slow city road with probably about 30 traffic lights. It takes me right past an quick access to 95 where I can drive much much quicker (and this is what I actually drive).

3. GPS route prefrences only have the option to avoid highways... not to prefer them. Don't get me wrong, I like pleasure driving on back roads much more than crowded highways, but clear highways are almost always faster than back roads... the unit should know if the highway is clear w/ the traffic updates and should be able to avoid traffic when it does occur. I live in center city (downtown) philly and work in the northern suberbs, the GPS would have me drive right through to the crowded local streets of North Philly (no offence to anybody living there, but it is a terrible neighborhood... just check out its current murder rate), rolling through north philly might be doable in the daytime, probably not w/ the top down... and nighttime is almost definitely not an option.

4. HDD music server has been very difficult to get going. My first problem there was a time where I made the mistake of letting ITunes control my music and as a result, it messed up my library and converted lots of stuff to m4a. Well I had to convert everything out of m4a and back to either mp3 or wma. This was not a real issue, but while I did that I decided that I would fix all my ID tags. I new the music server sorted sonds by genre-album-song so I made sure that every one of my songs had an appropriate genre to them. It never coccured to me that nowhere does the server sort by artist! WTF... well I decided I would go back again and put all my album IDs w/ artist-album and I should be ok (not great, but at least it is something). I made a data disk loaded it up and listened to it for a while. I was very happy with playing the disk on its own. The ID tags came up and everything seemed to be working properly. I then went to copy the files to the HDD and find that the copy function does not import the files in using the ID tags and I would have lable them manually! WTF this is not going to work... I will not input some 4k songs manually, I just don't sit idle in my car that much (another thing you can't do while driving). My G/F was in the car the other day and put in her new CD of Hairspray... I figured it was a nice opportunity to try and import the CD to the server, but again, the CD didn't have any track lables. There is no way I'm going to import all my CDs and label each song individually.

I know it must sound real bad, but I know I"m still not totally comfortable with the controls and I"m sure the unit will get better (anything with this many functions has to have at least some kind of learning curve). As I said above, I'm generally happy with the unit, but I would be ecstatic and think the unit would be just about the perfect 1-DIN unit if I got my list above sorted out.

Question about #1: What would happen if I put a switch into the parking brake line and the VSS line that would ground the brake line and just disconnect the VSS (or does it need to go to ground)? Would I trick the unti to think it was parked? I want to keep the GPS functional... will this stop the GPS from functioning properly (I know I need to have the parking brake cable connected when calibrating). I'm think that grounding the parking brake cable will throw the parking light on AND in my07, I know the car beeps when you try and drive w/ the brake on, so I might throw in two switches, one to connect the radio to the ebrake, and another to connect to ground.