This is it - a colour LCD widescreen able to display TV and DVD, and a full in-car navigation system as well! This week we show you the step-by-step DIY installation process for the MS5000 VDO Dayton navigation system.
As we've already covered in AutoSpeed, the latest breed of VDO/Dayton navigation systems are pretty exciting pieces of gear. And unlike alternatives, the topline MS5000 navigation system's colour LCD screen can also be interfaced with other devices - so you can use it to display TV, DVD, videotape or even the output of a camera! That flexibility makes the asking price for a sat nav system a bit more palatable - you save the odd $1000 on buying the other good quality screen (as well as finding the space for it!) that you would otherwise need for complete in-car entertainment. But let's get back to the beginning...
The MS5000 system uses a combination of satellite GPS reception and internal estimation (the latter based on a speedo input and an internal direction finder) to calculate where you are. But it does more than that - it will also tell you where to go. Inside the main unit is a CD ROM drive that absorbs street layouts from a map CD, while internal software works out the best of those roads to use in order that you get to your location. The outputs of these thought processes are instructions by voice (and arrows on the screen) telling where and when to turn, when to go straight ahead, and when you have arrived at your destination.
The result is staggeringly effective - don't be misled by the oh-so-bored blasé tones used by some motoring journalists in their reviews of the system. Make no mistake, in-car navigation is like mobile phone technology of ten years ago. Back then a phone was regarded as expensive luxury - the requirement only of hotshot businessmen. Today of course phones are as common (and cheap!) as mud. So while we're quite sure that in two years' time an in-car nav system will be vastly cheaper than it is today, for some people its usefulness right now more than outweighs the cost.
Especially if, like me, you've just moved interstate and have to daily navigate your way around two major and completely unknown urban areas...
Buying
Relatively new products, the VDO Dayton nav systems have yet to find their price niche. Complicating matters is that some retailers refuse to sell the product to those who wish to install it themselves - and installation can add up to $400! Further, some retailers don't include the map CD in the system price, while some outlets appear to be buying the gear at different wholesale prices to other retail outlets. In summary, shop around!
I purchased the MS500 system (comprising the PC5000 car computer, the MM5000 5.8 inch colour widescreen, remote control with docking cradle and the wiring looms) for $3000. However, I also saw prices at different retailers as much as 20 per cent higher than this. The $3000 price was from Peter Pantelas of Brisbane Car Sound - who, incidentally, had no idea that I'd be writing about the gear in AutoSpeed.
Note that if you install the navigation system in your business car, you may be able to claim it as a tax deduction.
Installation
When a retailer refused to sell me the system if their company didn't perform installation, I asked to look at the books that come with the nav system. One is entitled "Mounting Instruction" and is quite clear in its information....so much for the need for 'expert' installation! However, while there are no real tricks to overcome, doing a good job requires some careful work, especially in a few areas that can usually be ignored when installing electrical car accessory gear.
Mounting
The first step in the installation process is to decide on the placement of the main car computer. This looks like a CD player in that it is DIN-sized and has a CD slot in the front. However, except for an eject button, the other normal CD player controls and buttons are noticeably absent.
There are several criteria that need to be addressed when picking the mounting location for this unit:
- There must be at least 130mm clearance in front to allow CDs to be inserted and ejected
- The unit must be stably mounted
- It must be horizontal (within plus/minus 10 degrees)
Both a mounting sleeve (suitable for DIN-hole dash mounting) and a full metal body (boot or underseat mounting) are provided. But the requirement that the unit be almost perfectly horizontal will exclude most dash mounting spots, and in many cars a second dash DIN slot isn't available anyway. In my Audi S4 sedan I chose to mount the unit in the boot under the rear deck - next to the factory 10-disc CD changer, in fact.
Conscious of the fact that (a) the unit is worth a lot of money, and (b) that the instructions say that it must be firmly mounted (any movement may upset the internal direction-finding apparatus), I looked with some concern at the self-tapping bolts supplied with the brackets. And when I drilled some holes in the rear deck's thin metal and screwed the self-tappers in - only to have them pull straight through - my suspicions were confirmed. So I purchased some new bolts, spring washers and nuts. Wanting to have the installation looking at least as 'factory' as the CD-changer, I used 'cap' bolts (ie round heads with internal allen-key recesses) which also had the added benefit of allowing easier tightening in the close confines under the rear deck cover (I just lifted the trim panel to gain access, rather than removing it entirely).
The mounting brackets for the car computer module allow quite a lot of angle adjustment to make the unit horizontal. Additionally, holes are provided at different heights to allow the unit to be located to provide clearance for the insertion and ejection of the CD. I used a spirit level to make sure that the module was level in both directions, and then tightened the new bolts and the provided short screws (complete with flat and shake-proof washers) that hold the brackets to the cradle.
Wiring
Once this was done the looms could be inspected. There are four cables:
- Car computer to LCD screen cable, with fixed plugs
- GPS antenna to car computer, with a fixed plug
And, shown here:
- Car computer to unterminated wires for power, earth, etc
- Car computer to DIN and miniature phono sockets, for connection to remote and external speaker respectively
These cables can be fed through the back of the open cradle, plugged into the car computer, and then the car computer slid into place. I chose not to leave a long loop in the cables coming from the car computer - to remove the car computer, the plugs will therefore need to be pulled first. In my installation there is
just enough rear clearance to allow fingers to be inserted to remove these plugs. When plugging and unplugging the cables, make sure that you don't inadvertently pull out the blade fuse that's also located on the back of the car computer unit.
With the car computer mounted, the next step was to connect some of the wires in the unterminated loom. The nav system requires these six connections before it will function properly:
- Constant 12V power
- Ignition-switched 12V power
- Earth
- Low beam headlights
- Reversing lights
- Speedo signal
With the main unit mounted in the boot, there were a number of connections that could be made locally. These were to the reversing lights and to the taillights. (The instruction manual states that the latter should be connected to the low beam lights, but the taillights can also be used.)
I did the reversing input first. To find the power feed to the reversing lights, I removed one of the reversing light bulbs from its boot-lid mount and then used a multimeter to locate the wire which had ~12V on it when the lights were lit - and 0V when they were not. Having found the right wire, I followed this back in the loom to an accessible spot - in this case at a connector near to the electric aerial, normally hidden behind the boot lining.
I checked again that this wire had 12V on it when it should (always double check - sometimes wiring colour codes change within the loom!), stripped back some of the insulation, and then soldered the right car computer wire to it.
I then wrapped the new join and its surrounds with tape, so that the join was insulated, the wire could not flex near to its join, and it couldn't chafe on any surrounding bodywork. With that done, the wiring could be pushed back into its normal location. The same approach was then followed with the taillights connection. (I prefer soldering and then taping to the use of crimp-on connectors, heatshrink, and the other ways of doing it. Pick your preferred method!)
Those two connections out of the way, it was time for the earth and constant power wires. In the Audi's case, an aftermarket subwoofer amplifier is mounted quite close to the car computer - and is fed with a battery-direct cable of hefty proportions with an equally good earth. Making the power and earth connections in parallel with the amp was therefore an easy and quick job. The speedo input and ignition-switched 12V input were best made at the front of the car, so at this stage I looked at running this and the other looms forward. Ah yes - nearly forgot - but not before I mounted the GPS antenna!
GPS Antenna
The GPS antenna is a small box on a metal plate - the complete unit is about half the size of a packet of cigarettes. While the instruction booklet doesn't go into detail, the location of the antenna is very important. The GPS system receives from multiple satellites at any one time - and the more than it can 'see', the better. Best vision comes from the most unobstructed view in all directions upwards - vertically, as well as north, south, east and west, right down to the horizon. The antenna can look through glass but not metal and so - while a location in the middle of the roof might be best - there are other spots a bit more aesthetic-friendly which are also still effective.
I chose the middle of the rear deck, beneath the shallowly-sloping rear glass. Other options include on the dashboard upper surface, on a bumper, or on the roof. (With the aerial on the rear deck, later the system proved capable of receiving up to 8 satellites simultaneously. Only four are needed at any one time.) The aerial can be screwed into place or located with the supplied double-sided tape - I chose the latter. The long antenna cable cannot be readily shortened - best to just loop it up and tuck the excess out of the way. In my case, that superfluous length went on top of the main unit in the boot.
The boot wiring was finished when the cables (monitor, remote/speaker and speedo/ignition 12V) were fed through the boot into the cabin. I wrapped the two latter looms together and fed these down the right-hand side of the car, while the monitor loom went down the left-hand side. Where the looms passed through the sheet metal behind the seat back, I slipped some split (new!) rubber fuel hose over each of the looms to protect them from the bodywork edges and seat wires.
Once this was done, the boot trim panels could be put back into place.
One reason that the looms went down different sides of the car was to give the required room. The cables are quite thick - fitting them all under just one side's trim pieces was going to be near-impossible. Here is the right-hand side, showing the power/speedo and remote/speaker looms.
Two further connections needed to be made to the unterminated loom - ignition-switched 12V and the speedo signal. The switched 12V was accessed at this fuse/relay board located to the right of the steering column (and normally buried under a trim piece). That was easy - but what about the speedo signal? This proved to be a real drama - one I'll come back to that in a minute.
Remote
Next up was the mounting of the remote. All user inputs to the nav system are done via the remote control, so it needs to be mounted so that it can easily be operated while you're seated in the car. In fact, while the remote can be detached from its cradle, it's primarily designed to be used in whatever location that you pick for the holder - the manual suggests that internal batteries in the remote will easily leak in a hot car and so none are supplied! (When the remote is in its holder it is powered by the car.) The remote mount can either be screwed into place or attached using the supplied double-sided adhesive. I chose the tape, and located the remote on the centre console just to one side of the handbrake.
The LCD screen I mounted in front of the passenger, just to the left of the centre console. This still allows good vision by the driver (the horizontal viewing angle of the screen is very good) and that particular area of the dash was also both flat and protected from overhead light (and windscreen reflections) by an overhang. While screen mounting screws are provided, there is nary a bracket to be found in the boxes, so I used high-quality 3M double-sided tape (that wasn't included!) to stick the screen into its location. However, this mounting later needed to be changed - I'll return to this in a moment.
Ok - now what connections were left over? Firstly, there were two that I haven't yet mentioned - they've remained anonymous because they're optional extras. One is for the radio mute - presumably it quietens the sound system when The Voice is talking - and the other is to allow switching of an external TV or video signal. I don't have the latter and my radio's mute function doesn't seem to be able to be accessed externally, so these wires remained unused. That left just the speedo signal wire.
At this stage of the installation the unit should have been able to be operated, so I switched on the navigation system. Up came a request that the CD be inserted, with the screen showing a moment later my street name and suburb! Yep, it had picked out where I lived, just like that....
Speedo Input
So it all seemed to be working - but what about the speedo input? I'd always known this was going to be a little tricky. The Audi has an electronic speedo (as do the vast majority of cars of last ten years - to install the nav system into earlier cars requires the use of a speedo pulse generator) but where was the speed sensor output wire? I'd been told by two sources that it was "a white wire with the blue trace on the connector behind the radio". I figured that this was a possibility because in some markets the car is probably fitted with a radio that has a speed-dependent volume control. And when I got the radio out, I could see that there were three wires provided in the loom not being used by the radio - and one had the right colour code. But then when I drove back and forth, back and forth, trying with a multimeter to find a speed signal, there was nothing. I tried each of the three wires on DC volts (looking for an on/off voltage pulse), AC volts (looking for a sine wave), Hertz (looking for a frequency), and continuity (looking for a make/break) but all to no avail. In fact I made myself carsick driving back and forth under the carport looking at the meter, so decided that I'd wait until my assistant got home from work... But when she arrived to watch the meter, we had no more luck.
In fact I started to doubt if my info about this wire was right.
I then got out the 3-volume Robert Bentley factory workshop manual on my car, something I had wanted to avoid since the wiring diagrams are in a format which is, well, very weird indeed to read. But after a bit of searching, there was the speed sensor output wire - brown with a red trace, pin 8 of 26 on the main instrument panel cluster connector. And when I got the panel out, it proved to be the right wire, with a strong signal measurable on AC volts. And then when it was connected to the navigation system, all the wiring was complete and accounted for - all functions working. But locating the speed signal without the manual would have been real fun....something to keep in mind if doing an install on a car for which you don't have a lot of information.
System On
After a short calibration drive, the system was operating fine. However, over the next day or two a problem surfaced. The LCD screen, mounted close up against the flat dash panel, got extremely hot. When the screen brightness was set to full, after a few hours the metal tab on the base of the screen was almost too hot to touch... not good, especially when the ambient temp was only about 25 degrees C. Then, after the system had been on for a few more hours, it shut down, the screen going blank. The manual states that this will occur if the temperature is extremely high or low - obviously the screen was getting too hot. The display has some ventilation grilles set into its back that apparently should not be obscured at all. (The installation manual makes no mention of maintaining good ventilation around the screen... interesting when some people are setting them into trimmed receptacles!) So to allow the passage of air around the whole screen module, I made a bracket from aluminium and mounted the screen with a small gap behind it. After that the screen was much cooler, and the shutdown problem disappeared.
We'll bring you a detailed report on how well the system performs in a few weeks' time.
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