Finally... The Alpine iDA-X001 and KCE-300BT are fitted (for now!)
They arrived on Thursday night... I opened them and got a little scared by the amount of wires!
The car came back on Friday lunchtime from the dealer. I got a call saying it had been fixed - but they'd damaged my inside door panel trying to get the door open. The part has been ordered - but is on back order so may take a week or 2. Its beside the lock - so you only see it if the door is open.
Anyway... with the remainder of my lunch break on Friday I finished wiring in my Micro Roadpilot. I went for a run round the mountains on Saturday afternoon and put a few hundred miles on the clock. When I returned, I sat in the car and took out the courtesy light, followed by the drivers sun shade... and then ran my handsfree Mic from there down into the cubby under the light switch.
On Sunday I took out the ashtray, gear lever cover and most of the center armrest and ran my iPod USB cable into the under the ashtray.
On Monday I was feeling brave - so I dissasembled the whole dash as described in the tutorials and removed the standard stereo and the aircon controls.
I then fitted the new stereo using the Blaupunkt CanBus adapter and the genuine VW fascia adapter. I used some double sided tape and stuck my 300BT in behind the aircon controls, and then using plenty of tie wraps fitted all the wiring so that it didnt rattle.
Everything seemed to be working well until it started getting dark. I put my lights on, but the stereo did not dim like its supposed to with the CanBus... and the stereo is extremely bright!! After several phone calls to Alpine and Blaupunkt it turns out I dont really need the CanBus! Funnily enough I ended up speaking to a guy from Blaupunkt living in Amsterdam whos originally from 20mins up the road from me! He owns a MK2 Golf and was advising me on how to fit the stereo without the CanBus! It will require a bit of fiddling with the wiring as per some tutorials kicking about - but the CanBus seems to tick and make funny noises - so I'd rather do away with it!
Looks like I need to connect my Orange wire on my Alpine (illumination) to the back of the light in the cig lighter. That way it will get a 12V signal when the lights come on - and that should dim my stereo display. I will need to tap into the back of the light switch to get the switched and permanent live - but this seems easy enough. I'll live with the brightness for the moment as I'm away on holiday on Saturday... plus I need to order an aerial adapter before I do it.
I'm not really looking forward to starting again - but it will be less wires and adapters to tie up this time! I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do with the iPod cable in my armrest! I'd quite like to put a dock in - but I'll sort that out another day.
Heres a rather blurry pic of the install:
And heres a pic for SteveS to let him see the difference between my front non tinted and rear tinted windows:
