I'm pretty sure that you're right. Thanks again for taking the time to help me out, I was really starting to pull my hair out on this one!

I'll post later tonight if I get it working.

 

glad to see you got it all up and running and only 1 problem came out of all this modification. Good job.

 

Thank you I appreciate that but it has been your help that really got me through it and I can't thank you enough for it. I had never soldered anything in my life until doing this and now I really enjoy it.

Once I get the funds together to buy a computer to put in it I'll really be excited but that might not be for a couple of months.

 

well you did the major work of this so now it should be all down hill from here. Know that you have some electrical knowledge you will start thinking of how to make all kinds of complex circuitry to make things work. It gets to be more fun the when you do hard and complex things, cause you are now controlling many and multiple things at once. But once again great job on the build.

 

Well I don't know what it is but I can't get it to work. I was able to confirm that the things that I thought were the 5 pins are actually spacers. There is a tiny plastic piece that pops in and goes on top of the ribbon to hold it in place and when you pull that plastic piece out you can see the 4 real pins on the inside and I checked the continuity on them with the 4 wires that are soldered to the board off the back and it was definitely right so I took my ribbon and put a "collar" on it so that it wouldn't be able to slide side to side and it was pretty well locked into place and I tested continuity and all was good. Put it in the car and nothing. So at this point I'm pretty much stumped as to why I can't get the signal to pass through. For the wiring I used 20 gauge stranded wire for most of it and 22 gauge single core wire to solder to the flat flex connectors because the stranded wire was just too thick to solder to it and I couldn't find a smaller gauge stranded wire. Do you think there could be an issue with using either of those wire types? I know for certain that the connections are good but possibly showing my ignorance here is the signal that the touchscreen is sending out not capable of going through the wires I am using?

 

No the wire sizes have nothing to do with it not working. Electricity does not run through the wires but on the outside of the wires. So the single solid wire is capable of doing the job since it is very minimal voltage being used. Try and run the usb controller calibration on computer while the head unit is in the car and see if you get a reponse from the touchscreen by that. If you do than you know that the problem lies somewhere between the relay and wire going back to the circuit board. I also just thought of something that was the hit and miss part of this install. You may not be getting a response because your x & y grids may not be going to the right connections. So when you are touching one point on the screen the grid coordinates are be computed by to a different coordinate. But do the usb controller calibration first to see if you get any response from the touchscreen itself.

 

I was actually thinking that maybe the stranded wire was the problem but I'm glad to know that the wire doesn't matter. I really wish that I had a couple more connectors so that I could make a test cable that would have a connector on each end and I could plug the touchscreen cable into one end and the replacement ribbon into the other and then into the computer board just to make sure that my ribbon is actually working. I might have to just order a couple more of those and another ribbon or two and wait until next week to try.

As far as where the connections are going that shouldn't have any effect on touching the screen when the relay is closed since I'm certain that I have the connectors/ribbons wired to the corresponding terminals on the relay so unless somehow they are getting mixed up inside of the relay and coming out different terminals I don't think this should be a problem. I can definitely see that beingn an issue on the wires going to the USB controller since we don't know which wire is sending out what coordinate and right now I just have those 4 wires connected via wire nuts so that I can swap them around once I know for certain that I have a signal going through them. I guess maybe I could power the relay and use the multimeter on those wires to see if a signal is coming through right?

I tried doing the USB calibration and when I plugged in the USB I got a notice that a new storage device has been detected and then I installed the Touchkit drivers and went through the setup as it suggested but in the software it showed that there weren't any devices connected so I'm not sure whether it's actually working or not.

 

you should multimeter the wires going into the relay with common and normally close to make sure you are solder to the correct connections. Same method as the board but keep one on the common and touch the normally closed circuit to make sure that leg 1 in is going to leg 1 out and not being switched internally my the relay. I know that some double throw switches dont always go parallel to each other.

 

Yep I have tested that and unless something funky is happening once it's in the car they are correct. I used that AC to DC converter that I bought and plugged my rocker switch into it and then powered the relay to the rocket switch and tested continuity from leg 1 to leg 1, 2 to 2, etc both closed and open and it worked perfectly. That's why I can't for the life of me understand why it's not working once it's in the car.

The one major difficult on this project is that with the long molex ribbon and the long ribbon from the touchscreen both in the same area they kind of get twisted up a bit when the unit is sealed back up. As far as I can tell even when the ribbon is folded the signal is still going through it but I don't know for certain other than when I've tested continuity on it like that outside of the car.

 

damn you have covered everything. I guess the only thing would to try and reverse engineer your connections. Work backwards from circuit board to touchscreen. I can feel your frustration cause i know how it feels to know that it should be working cause everything is wired up correctly. I will think and see if i can help you out with anything.

 

As always I appreciate your help and advice and at this point I definitely don't expect you to be able to figure out what is wrong over the internet but if a brilliant idea pops into your head I'd love to hear it LOL.

I just ordered 4 each of the 2 types of FFCs and 2 more ribbons and hopefully they will be overnighted to me for AM delivery so maybe I'll get to run my test this weekend with the [FFC/wires/FFC] jumper between the touchscreen and my ribbon and see if that's where the problem is.

Just to give you an idea of how much time I have spent on this after I had the harness done I tore the car apart on Saturday afternoon and brought the nav unit in. Then got it all wired up that night and went to put it in the car around 3pm on Sunday. Not too much install time invested at this point. Of course it didn't work and I went back and forth between the car and my work area with the nav unit testing and re-wiring until 2am that night before I gave up for the night. Then the same thing from 6pm Monday night until 2am. Then again on Tuesday night until 2am. Last night I finally said screw it after the first new attempt didn't work and went to bed around 9. Keep in mind I wake up at 6 on the weekdays so for the first 3 days of this week I had 12 hours of combined sleep, a car that is STILL torn apart and is driving me nuts to look at, I've pulled/inserted the 7 combined plugs from the radio/nav unit at least 20 times now and all I have to show for it is a mess of wires in a torn up car, a work area set up in my living room, and a gf that is about at her wits end with me on this project LOL.

Needless to say I'm not messing with it tonight.

 

troubleshooting usually takes longer than the initial install. Well ill go home tonite and do a mock up navi unit less the touchscreen and radio but i will try to work all the kinks out in my setup prior to doing the install. Ill just use light bulbs as the touchscreen and factory circuit board. None the less you'll figure it out.

 

I might try that tonight as well. On a standard household light bulb would you connect the power to the screwed area and the negative to the flat area on the bottom?

 

To be honest i have no idea cause home bulb housing have the ground wire internally and use the hot and neutral to send power there. Also you might blow your relay cause i dont think it is rated for 120v AC. But you can use any car bulb you have lying around.

 

Well I have it somewhat working! There were 2 problems.

1. The blue plastic on the new ribbon was trimmed slightly too much and it was shifting side to side. So I got a new ribbon and trimmed it very slowly test fitting it into the connector often. Once I knew that was working I put it all back together and tried it .... and nothing.

2. At some point the factory ribbon had 2 of it's pins sheared right at the end where the little white sticker is attached on the back side and helps to hold it into the connector by making it thicker. I had to get a magnifying glass to be able to see this but sure enough they were sheared and I freaked out! So I cut off that end part of the factory ribbon and SLOWLY started "chipping" away at the pins underneath the plastic to expose 4 new pins and then put that original piece of sticker on the new end and tested it in the normal configuration of the car ... and it worked, thank God! I considered giving up on the mod as I was thankful just to have the navi working as normal again but decided to press on and re-did the connectors on my harness just in case and after getting it all done and back together ... it worked!!! ... well sorta.

I think that I have a bad USB controller, or maybe I screwed it up sometime during the install/remove 200 times process so I have ordered a new one that should be here sometime this week.

I also ordered something that you might be interested in to power the scan converter which puts out a regulated 5v of DC power from 0-8A with no load on it and has a few other unregulated outputs as well. It was $100 shipped but it's a nice looking device and I originally found it on MP3car. Here is the URL for it:

http://jopeldesigns.com/acppsv1.html

I'll update this thread once I (hopefully) get the USB controller in and working.

 

Nice to see you got things rolling again on this project. I am still awaiting parts that is beginning to frustrate me real bad. I was told 5 weeks wait back in the first week of February and it is now 7 weeks in since than. Sorry i couldnt be much more of help but trouble shooting things over the internet is pretty tough considering all the wires and connections this mod takes. Thanks for that converter information but the power supply i have is part of the computer and will be powering the scan do unit. Hopefully you with the new usb controller that is the fix and you have a full working system. Keep me posted.

 

Just thought I'd let you know that it is now WORKING! It only took 2 attempts to get the coordinates matched up as well and here they are for your and other people's reference.

Sorry to hear about you having to wait on your parts. I haven't ordered my carpc yet but I have everything else other than that 5v power source which should ship early this week. I thought about powering the scan converter from the m2-atx but I decided this was the better route after doing some research on it.

Thanks again for all your help and hopefully soon I'll be able to test it with video.

 

Fucking sweet. Im excited to get this installed now that you got it all together. Good job and great patience, so you did determine that it was the usb controller what was not working for you.

 

Yep it was the USB controller, although it could have been something I did to it or the cables for it during all of those times of installing/removing while trying to get it to work.

It was pretty damn exciting hearing the "beep" when I touched the screen and my laptop cursor moved and the laptop beeped I'll tell you that!

I'm going to work on the video this weekend and hopefully it's straight forward. Once I get it all done I will be putting up a long tutorial on this for anyone else who is interested.

Hopefully you can get yours started soon as well.

 

Yeah my parts should be arriving from japan in two weeks than its time to strip the whole car down and get the install under way.

 

ok i finally got my parts all together and installed but i am having trouble calibrating the usb touch screen controller. I try to do the draw test and i get not lines. I try to do a 4 corner calibrate but nothing happens. Does my resolution of my monitor play a role with me not being able to get and response. I do hear beeps every time i touch the touchsreen. So im stuck here with no idea of what i need to do. Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

You know I didn't do the calibration on mine so I'm not sure about the lines, I didn't even think about doing it. As soon as I connected the usb to the laptop (1920 x 1200 resolution) I touched different corners of the screen and parts in the middle and everything worked as I expected. if you're getting beeps then it's definitely registering. Have you tried not being in the calibration section and just touching the screen to see if the cursor jumps?

I feel your pain though, I'm stuck on the video and have practically given up on it. I have everything wired correctly but all I get is a black screen when I flip the switch. I know the relay is good because when there's no power I see the nav screen just fine, flip the switch and I get nothing.

 

i got it to work i just had to reload the software again and than bam it is all good to go. So hopefully i will have my full carpc up and running. Ill post some pics of my finish product soon. How is your project coming along.

 

Oh good deal!

LOL seriously? Did you see the part above about my video problems?

 

i am working on figuring out how the video part works. I bought a harness and I am taking it apart to see how the other navi video products work so i can mimic that idea. Ill keep you posted.

 

I really don't know why it's not working. I verified which pins carry the RGB and sync signals and the pins on the RGB NavTool cable that carry those signals and they're matched up but all I get is a black screen. Not black like it looks when the car is off, but a "lit up" black if that makes any sense. Like maybe if the TV is on but you're on a channel not displaying anything.

 

how are you running the signal and how are you splitting it between stock navigation and car pc. I havent started it yet but i am thinking of how to do it.

 

I put another relay on the end of the NavTool harness and have the 4 video wires from the female end of the harness (which would be video out from the DVD) going into the relay nc, then 4 wires going from the relay common to the male end of the harness and then the 4 wires from the NavTool RGB end going into the relay no. All works well when there is no power but as soon as I give it power the video switches sources and it's that black screen.

 

I think you may need to switch the lines up, the scan do will takes the VGA signal and convert it to RGB sync thus send the signal out through different means. This may be a different process of video rather than your typical video in like the navtool does and converts its signal. So find the following pin numbers and make sure they correspond to the same color. 8 is the sync that you may need to splice in place of the sync you have now that brings a picture up. Page 20 of the scan do manual is where i got this information from. I been pounding my head for days trying to figure this out as well. I have not gotten that far to plug in the 20pin harness but i believe this is why you are not getting a signal cause your sync my be off. Good luck.

1. Ground
3. Red
4. Green
5. Blue
8. Composite Sync

 

Yeah I have pin 8 from the RGB cable going to whatever color the wire is for the sync that I got from the Acura Service Manual on the 20pin connector, which I think was pin 11 or 12 but I can't remember.

The only thing I don't have is I don't have the ground from the RGB cable going to the ground wire on the video, I have it grounded to the vehicle because there are only 4 positions on the relay but I don't think that should matter.

 

You seem to have everything covered, the part that i am stumped with your setup is that if you have the RGB to the right wires than you should have atleast red green and blue bars running across the screen

 

I have double-triple-quadruple checked that the wires are going to the proper colors. At this point my guess is that the scan converter rgb out might not work but I can't really test that. Or it could be that even though I can force my laptop video card to output 640 x 480 it might not actually be going lower than 800 x 600 and maybe the screen won't support that. I'm anxious to see whether you get yours working. Were you able to get the original posters scan converter or are you using the blackbox one that I bought?

 

im using the same black box that you are using maybe try and read the black box manual and see if that has any helpful information for you.

 

when you flip the switch to activate your relay is your laptop display still showing.

 

Here is a table on how I have it wired

 

Yes the laptop display still shows because there is nothing to tell it not to show.

The only thing I could find in the blackbox manual was the pinout for the rgb connector which was very useful, but I didn't see anything else. I didn't see any way to force an output resolution from it and I'm guessing that it outputs the same resolution that is put into it.

 

Have you told the laptop to only display video out signal and not as a dual monitor? Look at this website http://www.tkk.fi/Misc/Electronics/c...b_pinouts.html on the RGB pinouts to make sure you have them going to the right wire. You may need to check continuity to each wire to make sure that each color is coordinated to each pin.

 

Also on the 20pin harness you should be tapped into pins 1,2,11 and i cant figure out which one is sync. 1 is red signal, 2 is green signal, and 11 is blue signal.

 

is your video cable from your laptop going to the 15 pin 2 rows and not the 15 pin 3 rows. It should if the black box came with that supplied cable.

 

I have tried the laptop as dual and in the presentation mode where it's only showing video on the external monitor. What I am concerned with is that my laptop won't natively go less than 800 x 600 and met said he had his set to 640 x 480 and I can set a custom mode for the secondary display of 640 x 480 but I don't know if that's actually working as it should.

Yep I definitely checked continuity from the pins on the RGB cable to the wires and they match up.

I don't have the service manual with me but I think 12 is the sync if those other 3 are the RGB because I remember them being 1,2,11,12.

Yeah I have the supplied cable plugged into the VGA in and then the traditional 3 row 15 pin in plugged into the computer.