Well, I've had the new Scooby for about a year now. It still hates me, and generally tries to inflict pain on a monthly basis (flat tyre, bumper scratch, dead battery, new rattles, failed strut, ...).

But I do love driving the ungrateful beast, except for the lack of a good selection of tunes. So it's time to install an empeg into it, while keeping the decent factory tuner head unit.

I was planning to use the PCATS Display Extender, but it does have the issue of having to find space for the daughter board that it provides at the display end of the cable, making things a bit too bulky to easily accommodate it all.

The radio / dashboard fascia was easy enough to pop off -- have done it before when adding a backup camera to the factory-provided "Multi Function Display (MFD)". Looking around inside the dash, there's a huge cavity in this particular trim model. It has automatic climate control, which means the knobs for temperature/fan etc.. are all just rotary encoders, fly-by-wire rather than actually fiddling directly with vents and louvres.

Other trim versions need the space behind the knobs to hold mechanical wizardry, but not this puppy. There's enough space back there to mount two empegs, deep behind the fascia.

Two problems with that location: (1) accessibility is difficult for servicing the empeg (adding tunes, fixing problems, etc), and (2) a remote display is required.

The first issue (deep burial) can mostly be mitigated by providing an ethernet/wifi connection, as many others have done before. But I really want access to the hard drive (SSD) itself. So I'm wiring in an IDE/SATA converter board, and then an 18" SATA extension cable from that, to permit having the SSD in a more accessible location under the glovebox.

The second issue (display) turns out to not be so bad: I made up a 14" long ribbon cable for the display, and can surface mount it separate from the empeg, in a reasonably good location just under the climate controls. So no need for the PCATS extender this time around.

I've prepared all of the cabling, and modified the empeg enclosure to gain external access to it. Hopefully the install (on Sunday) will go smoothly. There's still some work to make a mounting system for the display, but the rough prototype I have already will do for the moment.

Photos later.

Meanwhile, I have to figure out how to use the bigdisk builder. It's only been a decade or so.. smile