Carputer pics part 2: Moving the climate controls
After failing to find a pre-made extension cable (or even a wiring harness) for my climate controls, I set out to make my own.
In the close-up at the end of the previous article, the left connector has two rows of 10 pins and the right side has two rows of 8 pins. The brown plug is for a light that sits below the climate controls and points down to illuminate the ashtray (coin tray) and the cigarette lighter (power plug). Not needing a light inside my armrest, I removed it. The backlight is internal and still works fine.
Needing to make both a female connector to plug into the back of the climate controls and a male plug to connect to the wiring harness in the dash, I started working on the female side first.
My first attempt was to use an IC socket. The pin spacing was just right, but the two rows were too far apart. To bring the rows closer together, I cut the ends and sanded down the nubs that were left behind. Simply gluing the two halves together (lacking the previous gap in the middle) brings the rows too close. To compensate, I found that a piece of floppy drive ribbon cable glued in between gave the perfect spacing:
Right: a standard IC socket.
Left: modified to get the two halves just close enough.
It proved too difficult to wires soldered to the legs without having some of them come off while working on the others. It was also problematic to have the legs (and wires) pointing stright out becuase as mounted, there isn't much room below the bucket in the armrest. Just a couple mm below the armrest is the airbag sensor... something I really can't move.
Searching for another solution, I gave a PC floppy drive ribbon cable a try. Two problems: 1) the two rows of pins on the cable were way too close together so I was only hitting one row and 2) the pins on the climate controls are shaped like a popsicle stick while the pins a floppy drive are square. Both of these problems seemed solvable. To make the pins fit better, I sanded down the face of the floppy connector:
The connector now fit onto the pins more easily, but didn't make good contact. Looking closely at the picture above, you can see the gold-colored contacts are only on one side of each hole. Because the pins weren't square, they sometimes wouldn't make contact. I needed a way to make the hole a little be smaller. Enough smaller to make good contact, but not so small that the pins wouldn't fit. As I already had a floppy cable in my hand, I stripped the plastic off one of the wires and pulled seven strands of wire out (each about the thickness of a hair). Twisting the strands together, I put the mini bundle into a hole. To keep it in place, I folded it over and put the slack into the hole across from it. Since the climate controls' pins had their rows spaced too far apart, the second row of holes on the floppy cable wasn't going to be used anyway, so this wouldn't be a problem. Using a dot of super glue, I held the wire in place. I then repeated the process for each of the other seven holes on my test cable. The picture above shows four of them complete.
That still leaves the problem of the row spacing. How could I get the second row? Simple: use two floppy connectors. It took a lot of tweaking with a dremel to get the pieces filed down just right so that two of them together would fit into the connector. From the side, the look like this:
Confident that I had a working connector, I started soldering the ribbon cable some cat5 (plentiful around my house and I didn't have 3 feet of ribbon cable):
Next up was to make the male connector. Knowing the approx pin size, I went with a laptop<->desktop IDE adapter:
Again, the problem of row spacing came up. To get the rows farther apart, I use a dremel to cut off half of the pins:
and then stuck two of those together which came out to be perfect.
I took it out to the car for a test fitting:
and it seemed to work pretty well:
To get the wires to go inside the armrest, I'd have to make the one non-reversible step in this whole ordeal. I had to cut out a hole. Wanting to make sure I got it right the first time, I painted the frame of the connector on the back of the climate controls, then lowered them into place within the armrest. This left a nice mark inside the armrest showing me exactly where to cut:
If I ever do want to put the car back to stock condition, I can simply cover the hole with a piece of plastic, then put the stock felt square back on top :) Othewise, you'd still have to pick up the felt to see this:
And with a great sigh of relief, I was done and had working climate controls:
For the curious, it's been over two years now, and they still work just fine in there... helps that they're all digital and the sensors are remote.
In the close-up at the end of the previous article, the left connector has two rows of 10 pins and the right side has two rows of 8 pins. The brown plug is for a light that sits below the climate controls and points down to illuminate the ashtray (coin tray) and the cigarette lighter (power plug). Not needing a light inside my armrest, I removed it. The backlight is internal and still works fine.
Needing to make both a female connector to plug into the back of the climate controls and a male plug to connect to the wiring harness in the dash, I started working on the female side first.
My first attempt was to use an IC socket. The pin spacing was just right, but the two rows were too far apart. To bring the rows closer together, I cut the ends and sanded down the nubs that were left behind. Simply gluing the two halves together (lacking the previous gap in the middle) brings the rows too close. To compensate, I found that a piece of floppy drive ribbon cable glued in between gave the perfect spacing:
Right: a standard IC socket.
Left: modified to get the two halves just close enough.
It proved too difficult to wires soldered to the legs without having some of them come off while working on the others. It was also problematic to have the legs (and wires) pointing stright out becuase as mounted, there isn't much room below the bucket in the armrest. Just a couple mm below the armrest is the airbag sensor... something I really can't move.
Searching for another solution, I gave a PC floppy drive ribbon cable a try. Two problems: 1) the two rows of pins on the cable were way too close together so I was only hitting one row and 2) the pins on the climate controls are shaped like a popsicle stick while the pins a floppy drive are square. Both of these problems seemed solvable. To make the pins fit better, I sanded down the face of the floppy connector:
The connector now fit onto the pins more easily, but didn't make good contact. Looking closely at the picture above, you can see the gold-colored contacts are only on one side of each hole. Because the pins weren't square, they sometimes wouldn't make contact. I needed a way to make the hole a little be smaller. Enough smaller to make good contact, but not so small that the pins wouldn't fit. As I already had a floppy cable in my hand, I stripped the plastic off one of the wires and pulled seven strands of wire out (each about the thickness of a hair). Twisting the strands together, I put the mini bundle into a hole. To keep it in place, I folded it over and put the slack into the hole across from it. Since the climate controls' pins had their rows spaced too far apart, the second row of holes on the floppy cable wasn't going to be used anyway, so this wouldn't be a problem. Using a dot of super glue, I held the wire in place. I then repeated the process for each of the other seven holes on my test cable. The picture above shows four of them complete.
That still leaves the problem of the row spacing. How could I get the second row? Simple: use two floppy connectors. It took a lot of tweaking with a dremel to get the pieces filed down just right so that two of them together would fit into the connector. From the side, the look like this:
Confident that I had a working connector, I started soldering the ribbon cable some cat5 (plentiful around my house and I didn't have 3 feet of ribbon cable):
Next up was to make the male connector. Knowing the approx pin size, I went with a laptop<->desktop IDE adapter:
Again, the problem of row spacing came up. To get the rows farther apart, I use a dremel to cut off half of the pins:
and then stuck two of those together which came out to be perfect.
I took it out to the car for a test fitting:
and it seemed to work pretty well:
To get the wires to go inside the armrest, I'd have to make the one non-reversible step in this whole ordeal. I had to cut out a hole. Wanting to make sure I got it right the first time, I painted the frame of the connector on the back of the climate controls, then lowered them into place within the armrest. This left a nice mark inside the armrest showing me exactly where to cut:
If I ever do want to put the car back to stock condition, I can simply cover the hole with a piece of plastic, then put the stock felt square back on top :) Othewise, you'd still have to pick up the felt to see this:
And with a great sigh of relief, I was done and had working climate controls:
For the curious, it's been over two years now, and they still work just fine in there... helps that they're all digital and the sensors are remote.
posted by The Amigo at 1:21 AM
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