matt-c

Use the amp bypass cable. It will save making a mess of cutting up the wiring loom http://www.amazon.co.uk/Autoleads-PC2-92-4-Audio-Harness-Adaptor/dp/B0043GWBEU

Finally! Someone that understands what the programme is about! I can't believe in this day and age, 20 something seasons down the line, people still think this is a car review show!

Don't forget - Top Gear is back on again tonight, 8pm, and I bet all those that slag off the show, and Jezza & crew, will still be tuning in to watch ;)

Where have I said this? Please quote me saying this.

I haven't ducked out at all Knobby. You've mistaken not replying for actually being out and having a social life. You know - that thing you do with real people in the real world, and dare I say it, members of the opposite s*x! :o Oh no, that's right, you don't know that thing at all do you ;) But anyway, I still pertain you don't know what you're talking about, which is why you go onto other websites to copy stuff over to give the illusion you know what you're talking about. My post above was my being lost for words that you actually proved exactly what I've been saying perfectly well. The mere fact you thought that highlighting I can't solder was an attack or put down on me, goes even further to prove how much of an idiot you are. Tell me, where was it you learned I can't solder? Would it be where I wrote that I can't solder? That's right - I wrote it! So it's hardly a put down when I'm the one that said it, is it? Oh dear oh dear. Keep fishing knobby, you're doing fantastically at making all my points about you come true :)

Oh dear oh dear Knobby, that's just... wow... Oh dear!

And some coloured wiring turned up today, along with a loom sheath to tidy it all nicely. Just need to figure out a path to run the mini loom down from the dash top to the HU plug. I was originally gonna go to the side and drop straight down, but with a test fit, the plug sits much further back, as originally the wiring was part of the main harness that runs above the heater matrix. So I need to figure out a path to run it down behind that, without having to take the heater matrix out! Cos that'd be a ball ache!

And since when was copy and pasting become a crime matt? one of the things most of the reviewers were going on about in the videos was the M4's torque delivery and RC-F's lack of it when they should be going into details about how different highly tuned NA and Turbo engines behave in terms of how they put power down. yes matt i went on both BMW and Lexus websites and copied and pasted horsepower and torque figures to back up an explanation on power delivery characteristics only to get you so 'excited'.. do you need some tissues.. Um, I didn't say it was a crime. I just think you need to get out more than copy and pasting figures from one website to another. Well, because it's a bit sad really. It'd still be sad if you knew what it was you're actually talking about, but you don't, so you just try and blind everyone with the "facts and figures", which makes it all the more lame. And why would I need tissues? Can't your under exercised brain figure out I'm condemning the action, not laud it? Spend a little time in the real world chap, with real people and discuss and learn about real things. Broaden your horizons. Try not to fixate on the numbers related to two cars you'll never own, and so don't affect you in your life in any way shape or form. You'll be all the better for it :)

Not a lot going on at the mo, but did spend a few mins sorting out the multiplug I got for it. Even though it's the right plug, seems there's more than one configuration for the pins, to do with year of car, size of screen, remote control type, etc. The one I got wasn't the right pin config I needed, so I used a couple pins from an ISO lead and made them fit (as mentioned a few posts above). Anyway, I tidied the rest of the plug by trimming back what wasn't needed, and had a quick connect up to test everything works as should The red and black plug above is for the USB power connection to the tablet. I put it on a two-pin plug so it's easily detachable should I need to remove the whole thing from the car

No, just out - anywhere, so long as it's actually with someone, and not copying and pasting figures from one internet page into another.

Check the battery health, and it's earth(s) to start with

Jesus , John - you need to get out more!

I've already sent you the information via PM, Shortfuse

Do Lexus have a TG magazine subscription?

Did any of you actually expect the car to be tested on normal roads in everyday mundane situations? Of course it's going to be tested on their track and pushed hard. If you want to know what it's like on the A1 and B1043, go book yourself a test drive at Lexus. ****....

Well I know it as "the kit you buy from the guy on the Lexus Facebook page", so can't really help you there (ps, you know that FB allows you to add and not add people right? So if you join, and don't add anyone as friends, then no-one can see your "stuff". If anything it's more private than this forum, which anyone in the world can see you on, members or not)

There's a guy on the Facebook group that sells the complete kit. Join up and get one there

OLD THREAD BUMP ALERT! I just did this mod on mine. Bought a kit from a guy on the Facebook group page. Probably could have pieced it all together for less than I paid (£25 delivered) but then I'd rather pay a few extra quid and just buy a complete kit ready to go. Started wiring it in when I got in from work yesterday, but then realised I suck at soldering, made a bit of a mess and had to give up halfway through as I lost the light. So back out to it today, redid my messy soldering, and finished it off and it's all working (and so far the car hasn't caught fire, will keep an eye on it though as I know my wiring isn't the best!) View My Video

Lucky bleeder.... My install would be done now if mine did that!

There's something you have to do with the bypass cable - cutting one of the yew wires and connecting another one. I don't know as I've never used one. Have a search on Google, as it's been covered plenty of times. The wiring on the housing is easy - three wires for power (perm live, ignition live and ground) plus two more if you want the buttons to illuminate (just a positive and negative). Wiring to give power to the TomTom is easy too - just tap into the wiring for the cig lighter - it's a switched live so won't drain the battery charging the TomTom when the car is off. The main problem is making the TomTom come on and turn off automatically with ignition - unless your model has an option for that. Mine doesn't, which is where the headache is

Thanks. I'm on a bit of a hold at the moment because I'm waiting to hook up with my mate who's much better at soldering than me, and hopefully he's gonna be able to figure out how to turn the press on/off switch into an auto on/off switch. Everything else is done - it's just a case of splicing into the stereo harness for the 5 wires to the housing, and the cigarette lighter harness for power for the GPS. But no point doing that until we can get the actual GPS to power up.

Still not further on, as I still need to hook up with my mate to do some soldering and try to find a work around for the on/off switch in the GPS tablet. I've discovered that if I bridge the points where the press switch used to be, the tablet will power up. However, if the points remain bridge, it will turn itself off again after a few seconds - and it can only be rebooted by removing the bridge, and rebridging it. So, I need to find a work around that will allows these two points to remain physically bridged, but only allow a power flow through them fir the first few seconds, then after that either divert the power flow somewhere else or interrupt it. Something like a pulse power circuit, or in layman terms (and I'm a proper layman when it comes to this :D ) a "gate" On a brighter note, I got hold of the original plug that fits this nav housing, only to find after receiving it, the pin connections aren't quite as they should be. Seems it's from an earlier model, and although the plastic plug is the same, it's missing some connections for the pins I need to use. So I reverted to the original plan of cutting up a computer molex connecter - one end of which will have female spade crimps on the wires, which will attach to the pins on the nav housing, and the other end of which will be hard wired into the stereo wiring. Turns out, that's easier said than done, as the smallest crimps are just that teensy bit too big; they can be made to fit, but they touch. I could insulate them with heat shrink, but I'm still not 100% convinced. So I looked out a brand new ISO harness I've had in a drawer for years and years and never used (think it's ISO to mk4 Escort plugs) and hacked that about until I got two of the female pin receivers out, with their wires. Not a direct fit into the Lexus nav plug, but a bit of bending and squashing with some pliers and I got them in, and with a bit of careful angling, the plug fits in the nav, and all connections are made - tested it hooked up to a car battery and (same as the video above) and all functions work. So that's pretty cool, as all I'll need to do now is put a half metre or so of wiring on each of the 5 wires, insulate and wrap them, then they can be spliced directly into the stereo wiring for power, ground, and illumination Ordered me some heat shrink and a "my first soldering set" off eBay, so when that arrives I'll have a go at extending the wires, fit the two-pin plug to the GPS power wires (so that that can be plugged and unplugged at the dash-top end too) and hopefully won't be long after that, that we can start on trying to hack the power button on the GPS tablet

Pulled the dash apart today to have a look at the wiring I'll need to tap into and to check space for routing cables and the power adapter Found a nice little nook I can tuck the power adapter and 12v socket into, and there's plenty of cable on the end of it to route up behind the heater vents. Will need to lengthen the wiring on the molex harness to give enough slack to wire to the radio plug and be able to pull the housing out and not have it snag, but that should be simple enough, with a metre of 1.5mm wire, as I only need to extend each wire by 20cm or so. Need to order up some heat shrink to tidy it all up with - hoping that 3mm will be ok to fit over the crimp terminals (to insulate them inside the housing plug socket) and 6 or 8mm to cover the bundle of wires from the molex plug down to the radio plug. Gotta decide on colours now

Just ordered up some more connectors, this time for the table power supply. My plan is to hang a 12v socket off the wiring under the centre console that goes to the cig lighter. Then run the 12v socket up being the stereo, and plug in the standard power adapter that came with the tablet. Reason for this is not having to mess around soldering in resistors etc to get the voltage down from 12v to 5v. The reason for getting some more connectors (BEC type 2pin) is so I can hide the cig plug and power adapter behind the stereo, and just feed a pair of wires up around the air vents, terminate them in a connector, and then have the cable coming from the table (out of the nav housing) terminate in the other connector. That way, if I need to remove the nav housing, it's as simple as unplugging two connectors - the molex connector (for nav housing power) and the BEC connector for tablet power. It'd be nice to have something less bulky than the 12v socket and adapter behind the stereo, but so long as there's room it doesn't really matter so much. I was going to use a USB bullet adapter and just use the supplied USB cable, but I did that with a phone charger solution in my work van, and it wasn't a roaring success (it provided power, but not enough to charge the phone up properly. May well have been a rubbish USB cable, but either way I'm not going down that route for this project. I don't want to fry the cheap chinese PCB with incorrect voltages/ampage!)

Couple small updates; 1) managed to get hold of a loom plug for the housing, but unfortunately it's missing a couple of the pin connections I need. Seems that even though the plug is identical, earlier models (5" version) doesn't have the same pin connections, so there's some blank spaces where I need pins. Hopefully it will be rectifiable, but if not it's back to the original plan to use the molex connector, and just wire the negatives (ground plus illumination - to the same pin in the connector) 2) Bluetooth is now struck off the list. Although my Grom unit has USB, iPod and AUX (3.5mm jack) connections, and you can switch between them using a key sequence on the head unit, you can't actually have the plugged in at the same time. Tested this last night by having my iPod playing (iPod connection) and iPhone also plugged in (AUX) with a vocal speech playing (to replicate voice directions for a nav, or the callers voice if I was taking a call. Whilst both will function at the same time - iPod music is playing and I can hear the speech over the AUX, the volume is halved for both devices. Unplug the AUX jack and the iPod is restored to full volume. Considering that I'll be using the iPod 99% of the time, and the AUX would only really be used for taking a phone call (I almost never use voice directions on sat navs) this is no good to me. Shame they aren't isolated and would only work by switching inputs on the Grom, but I guess it's not to be. I'd never use the GPS media functions for music, as I have iPod for that - with much better control and sound - there's no reason to use video playback either; 1) because I can't see the point in converting video files to the correct codecs and resolution, putting them on a card and playing them back while driving anyway, and 2) because there's no point having video with no audio. So there's probably no real reason to get the card reader extender cable thing I linked to either, as the microSD card slot would solely be used for maps now, so I shouldn't need to get to it, to hot-swap. So we're back to only two core functions; touchscreen turn by turn offline maps (ideally TomTom if I can hack it to run) and reverse camera (which if version 1.0 works, then that will be coming in version 2.0)