Thanks so much, guys!

I am indeed quite happy with it. I have you guys and others on this BBS to thank, since a big part of this installation is the BlueGigaEmpeg project. I also have my roommate Fishy to thank, for his expertise with Blender and also for some expert operation of his expensive tools (more below). And of course, Stu for the display extender, without which none of this would be possible. I am continually patting myself on the back for having bought one of the display extenders when I had a chance, even though I didn't need it at the time.

The spot where it's mounted was originally for holding sunglasses. I chose that spot because there was no place high up on the dash to put it, it's all taken up by touch screens. There is a small cubby beneath the touch screen which might have worked, and I was originally thinking of putting it there, but it had a few problems, not the least of which was that it's down too far low and I would have to take my eyes too far off the road to look at it. With the empeg in the sunglass holder spot, I can still see the road with my peripheral vision when I glance up at it. Neither location is truly optimal, but the sunglass holder is less problematic than the cubby.

It's one of those interesting mechanisms where you press on it to open it and then push it again to close it. I don't know the technical name for that kind of latching system. When you open it, it swings downward to reveal the sunglasses, with a dampened motion on a small gear system (visible in one of the photos). It's quite intricate.

I wanted to have the sunglass holder door still work, i.e., still open and close, so that the empeg fascia could be tucked away and hidden when parked. And I wanted to keep all of that dampened motion and latching mechanism stuff, because it's so fun to operate. Luckily, the display boards tuck perfectly between the left and right sides of the sunglass holder, and a little dremeling made nice little troughs for the boards to snick into. So the whole thing continues to work exactly as it originally did, except now instead of dispensing sunglasses, it dispenses an empeg fascia.

I had to make a couple of important changes to the sunglass holder. The first is that the sunglass holder normally swings down 90 degrees, and I had to put a "stopper" tab in place which stops it at about 45 degrees or so. Also I had to design the stopper tab so that I could still swing it the rest of the way downward to the full 90 degrees, because that's the only way to get the thing apart for servicing. My final design allows me to disengage the stopper tab with a screwdriver or a swiss army knife screwdriver blade, swing it the rest of the way down, and get to the screws to get the console piece out of the ceiling for service.

The second change I had to make for the sunglass holder was that I had to cut away its whole front section. The holder was like a little "cup" and I had to cut away an entire side of that cup to make room for the fascia itself. Initially I just sliced it off with a dremel cutting disc, but it was hard to get the cut edge perfect. Then I had an idea. Fishy has a mill. Like a serious huge milling machine with digital controls and everything. In fact, in one of the photos you can kinda see him in the background operating that very machine (he's building a steam engine right now and the mill is a big part of that). He used the mill to clean up that edge cut absolutely perfect. In the photos, you can see that the plastic edge below the fascia is perfectly straight and smooth- that's Fishy's milling work.

Video and trunk installation details after I get the final PCB made for the BlueGigaEmpeg box and do a mounting bracket for the empeg sled. It'll be going in the "ceiling" area of the trunk, under the rear deck lid between the factor speaker locations.

Thanks!