Ho humm, so my father decided he wanted a new shiny toy so he's bought himself Sattelite Navigation.. I installed it for him on Saturday morning after getting a litte help from the datasheets at the local garage.. and what was I doing Friday night? Getting mashed.... quality hangover cure.... Before we begin.. This is how it looked before, Standard Philips Stereo with a Blaupunkt 6 CD changer in the boot, the big grey thing is the holder for his Sony-Ericsson P800. --- The panel removed from the boot with the CD changer still in place. (you open a flap on the top to get to the changer) --- Installation is pretty much like a normal car stereo, except the unit needs to know a couple of other things. One of them, is wether or not the car is in reverse or not. This is used to that when you reverse the map simply scrolls the other way and does not flip because it thinks the car has done an insane 180! The unit needed to tap into the + signal to the rear lights, Because the plug going into the rear light was sealed I had to dismantle the light cluster and trace from here which wire it was.. It turned out to be RED/ORANGE, easy job. --- So the connection is made here, just behind the CD changer, it was easy to run the cable with the changers cable, the sensor cable is the purple one. --- Like I said, the install is pretty much straight forwards, luckily enough the ISO plugged straight into the unit's harness, with the only exception that in the Frontera Red is Continous and Yellow is Accessory so these had to be switched round. The unit's harness had plugges that we're easily swapped. Also the ACC line was tapped into for the Cd Changer, and the ACC, BATT and ILL we're tapped into for the sattelite navigation unit too. The ground connections for these decvices are made through the car body as close to the unit as possible. The screen is acctually on, the flash has drowned it out. --- This is what it's doing.. upgrading the head unit's firmware and letting it know what Nav system there is connected. This incidentally wiped out all the tuning etc that my father had done to the head unit prior to this moment.. tee hee hee. --- Both the headunit and the Nav system also needed to know if the handbrake is on or not, for the headunit, this is so that It cuts DVD video to the screen if the car is moving, and for the sat nav it tells it that the car is stationary. By taking off the center hanbrake console there was plenty of room for the controls. The handbrake is the Green cable. The two plugs in the upper left are for the seat heating switches. The Yellow cable has those blue clips on them because the loom was 15' long and I only needed about a meter to get to the head unit so I moved the fuse back to here. The pink cable goes down to something which I'll explain a bit about later. --- The actual navigation unit had specific mounting instructions because of it's internal Gyroscope. It had to be horizontal. Had to be either in line with the car's movement or sideways on (settable via a small turn switch) it had to be as flat as possible, no more than 30 degrees up or 15 degrees down (for the gyroscope) this left only one safe, hidden feasable place, under the passenger seat. The aluminum strip is some shower trim we had lying about (we do own a plumbing & heating business!) which I bolted to the bottoim of the seat rails, and my father's main contribution to the install.... he Araldited the cage to the aluminium!! It is also mounted far enough in not to be kicked by passengers! --- One of the special features of this unit, and the main reason it stood apart from the others is for it's voice recognition. We had a microphone mounted here from an old phone kit and I needed to take the trim off here to un-install the old Garmin GPS unit anyway. It's close enought to the driver here, and doesn't suffer from road noise because it's quite high up. --- As I said above, I had to un-install the old Garmin GPS unit (it's going into the boat) and the old GPS arial was exactly the same as the new, magnetic back, so I taped some "catgut" wire to the old arial, pulled through the fishgut with the old cable through the bulkhead. Taped on the new calbe and pulled it back through. The new GPS arial now sits exactly where the other one was... it's a lot smaller as you can also see by the dirt that had collected under the old one! --- When my father ordered the stuff the head unit was supposed to have a DVD drive installed. However they couldn't get a hold of them so he sent the head unit without the drive and sent a 6 CD changer instead!!! Which is good, because the DVD unit was ugly, there's DVD in the navigator anyway, and my father preferres the changer. (they sell for £179 in halfords) The panel's not quite back properly in this picture, this unit is a lot smaller than the blaupunkt unit, but I managed to use the old mounts and the new one's together eliminating the need for drilling.... handy! --- Lastly but not least, the reason I needed to check the datasheets in the local garage... the unit needed a connection to the speed pulse generator in the car. The navigation works off 4 inputs. RDS for general placement. GPS for accurate placement, Gyro for movement and directional changes and the speed pulse generator for movement accross land. You can get two different speed readings. The Speed pulse generator gives you speed accross the ground. But the GPS will give you speed between two points, so if you we're driving up a steep hill you might be going 60mph accross the land, but only moving 30mph according to GPS. get it? Anyway, we founf out it was the Blue/Yellow cable coming out the back end of the gearbox, that's what the pink cable is! I loosened the retainers on the internal gear lever rubber and ran down a flexible tube to isolate just in case and this brought the cable out directly above the pulse sensor... Handy!! --- well that was it, the whole install was pretty strait forward. But of course in these situations included those horrible 10 anxious minutes leading up to the big switch on as you keep running it over in your mind... did I wire it correctly? (me brother didn't before and set his loom on fire) It cured my hangover pretty well, although once it got it working, I think it must have been the relief I felt pretty sick then... until I started playing about with it.... I can't tell you much more, It works, it takes voice commands, it tells you what to do, and reroutes if you cock up.... but at the moment the car is parked in Manchester Airport so poop!! Oh and one last thing... we found out why FM has declined badly in the car lately... the arial is borked!!! duh!
wow. nice looking kit. about how long did the install take you? Thats some good work there, I desperately want to put a computer in my car with a touchscreen for navigation and gps mapping. Just can't figure out where a screen would go (plus I don't have a job to pay for all this) looks really nice, nice work.
