My Turn for Head Unit Drama's!

[Moto]

So I installed a new aftermarket head unit yesterday and it all works great....except the steering wheel controls!

The instructions for this feature are poor at best so I thought I'd ask you guys. The HU unit has a screen which allows you to 'set' various functions by selecting the function on the screen and then 'assigning' a steering wheel button to them by pressing it.

I did manage to get the volume down button working but none of the others. This (worryingly) suggests the wiring may be okay and the problem is with something else right?

The HU manual talks about grounding a wire from the car and making sure it's connected to a wire from the DVD unit. However, they are all plugs and no loose wires.

Also the plug on the car side has 4 wires. The plug on the stereo has three (though the brown one is apparently unused). Can anyone tell em what the 4 wires in the cars steering wheel plug do specifically? (which one is which etc)

I notice this morning that the 'DISP' button used to scroll though the LCD menu in the dash doesn't work either. Other functions such as turn indicators and cruise control work so I hope it's just an issue with the new plug.

I'll contact the seller also but may get more sensible responses from you guys!

Cheers,

Steve

[Moto]

Okay, it seems from searching that grounding the pink wire will restore the DISP function. I'll look into that.

Still doesn't help with the volume up/down and skip/previous track. Reading other posts saying they the buttons run through resistors scares me :P

It appears this is what the wires do respectively on the connector I'm talking about.

Connector 3:

3 - Purple - Speed signal (used for ASL in stock unit)

6 - Pink - Steering control ground

7 - Orange - Steering control signal (for SEEK and VOL)

8 - Yellow - Steering control signal (for MODE)

Edited November 8, 2011 by Moto

[Steven]

Okay I'm going to try to bring you back to Earth a bit here.

Go to Ebay, search for Camry GPS or DVD or whatever - see all those results? They're all different types of units which all work differently and all have their own little problems. Nobody, without a unit in front of them and with experience on using THAT PARTICULAR UNIT is going to be able to give you accurate advise.

Do a search and read every topic on these units and you might come down with a list of things to try, but your best chance is to contact the people who sold you the unit and ASK THEM. They built the unit and (I assume) programmed it, they might be able to lead you in the right direction. I know you already said you did, so wait for an answer instead of going creating new topics. Give it a day or 2 of contacting the sellers or doing your own research before coming whinging to the forums.

Also, don't go creating new threads for every little issue you have - try posting in one of the many other threads on the topic. This keeps the forums cleaner and easier to search through so that people like you can find the answer they're looking for!

Finally, NO I don't care whether you think I'm a prick and aren't being helpful - I've actually given you some very sound advice here.

Rant over. Mods do whatever you think is appropriate

[Moto]

Bit of an unexpectedly rough response in my opinion but thanks for taking the effort to reply none the less.

You are of course correct, the most likely course of solving the problem will be through the seller. However, most of my comments/questions were based around the wiring on the car side and there is/was an off chance that it might be something that I have missed or is not clear from the units operational manual but could have been cleared up by someone who has come across this issue before.

You will note that I haven't come running on here crying as soon as it didn't work, I tried to resolve the issue myself (looking at wiring diagrams found on here), then searched the forums for information as evident by my above post, and then asked the question to the masses in conjunction with emailing the seller. I actually thought that was a relatively pragmatic approach.

With regard to starting a new thread, all of the other forums I frequent actually prefer this so as not to dilute the specific topic of another thread or have a thread that's 2000 pages, in a forum with 5 topics because everyone is scared to start a new thread; making it difficult to find specific answers. This is obviously not the case here so your advise on the matter will be noted for next time.

Lastly, I have taken the time to do an initial review of the unit in the 37 page long GPS head unit thread for the betterment of others on this site. Whilst I don't expect a medal for doing this a little bit of politeness wouldn't hurt when accidentally contravening a new thread rule you so eagerly pointed out.

Maybe you should change the text under your avatar from Pyromaniac to Megalomaniac

Edited November 9, 2011 by Moto

[DanielV]

Depending on the head unit(I bought a Alpine unit) u can buy a steering wheel interface module which wires into the steering wheel harness and allows you to program the factory buttons into an aftermarket unit. the one in my car works really well ill beit sometimes a bit slow but it works by modifying the signal of the button pushed to something the aftermarket unit can read. I paid about $180 for the unit and its been really good

[cal025]

Hey mate

I too recently installed a new head unit and speaker setup. i had this installed to retain the use of my steering wheel functions...

PAC SWI-PS Pioneer Steering Wheel Adapter FH-P8000BT

you should be able to find one on ebay to suit your head unit... only $60 or so...