remoting the display

Since I have no room to fit the empeg, I was thinking of removing the display and installing that in the ashtray or something and than hiding the rest of the unit somewhere.
Is the display easy to remove or is it directly attached to the main board? (I haven't opened my rio yet)

ta,
Frank

I guess removing the display is possible, its mounted on a seperate board. It will be a pain though.

This one is covered in the FAQ.

Thanks Tony, I should spend more time reading the FAQs, thanks for answering though.
Seems I have a problem ...

Refresh our memory. Why can't you mount it in the dash?

I have a Mercedes E and in the morning I'm having the oem radio removed to fit an oem (double din) navigation unit. So there's no room left to fit the empeg.
The only solution would be to not fit the nav and simply put the empeg under the radio (or swap them), but I *really* want the nav and there's no room for 3 din units ...

How about puting a PDA with Ethernet and a VNC client or a browser somewhere handy for display and control. You can add Sony stalk for easier control (and/or an IR repeater). Both mlord's khttpd and wfaulk's VNC server work very nicely.

And there's noplace like an ashtray or goodie pocket that can be removed and custom-fit a stereo?

Here's a pic of the dash. The panel under the radio is a goodie pocket but it'll be gone once the nav is installed. Beneath it is the ashtray, but there's some kind of ecu behind it which I would need to relocate. Even then I'm not sure there's place enough to fit the empeg, but I'll give it a try ... wish me luck.

Frank

It looks like you could have a custom installation shop re-do the center console insert and come up with a way to fit it. Would take time and expense, but may be do-able. They could fashion fresh wood fascias to make it all come together real nice.

The fact that the OEM nav is double-din is a bit of a problem. Have you considered going for an aftermarket nav that's smaller?

I have a Mercedes E and in the morning I'm having the oem radio removed to fit an oem (double din) navigation unit. So there's no room left to fit the empeg.
The only solution would be to not fit the nav and simply put the empeg under the radio (or swap them), but I *really* want the nav and there's no room for 3 din units ...



Let me know how that goes.... Everytime I mention that (fitting the COMMAND system at the dealer) I was told it was FAR too involved...

It COULD be done, you just have to rip half the car apart to do it, therefore major $ from the dealer. I'm wondering if the wiring harnesses for the E class are pre-wired for it, as opposed to the C's...

I thought of this but the current keyboard-less PDAs are either 160, 240 or 320 pixels wide. Mapping the 128x32 pixels of the empeg's display to these widths means either using 128/160th of the display (too small to read) or a non-integer multiplier (pixels doubled-up or gaps).

So what I am trying is some displays which are the same size or integer multiples of the native display. First off I have bought 3 displays from these folks. The nice thing about these displays is that they have a serial interface added on. So you don't have to build any hardware. Just hack up the Display Server or VNC server and plug the display into the empeg. The downside is they don't support grayscale. So I have bought samples that are twice as wide and/or high. Then I will map the single-pixel/four levels to 2 or 4 off/on pixels to simulate grayscale. If this looks too ugly then I have my eye on some 128x32 color displays.

You don't have to map the empeg display onto the PDA. There is a PalmEmpeg project (linked in the FAQ) that remote-controls the empeg with its own interface.

We are talking about remoting the display because we can't see the empeg. The Palm app as I recall gives you some feedback (current song?) but I want the whole native display on my remote. For control I have the Sony stalk remote.

Well, I could modify empegVNC to send the data sideways....

You mean for the PDA screens? The screens of the Palm devices (160x160 or 320x320) or Pocket PCs (240x320) are so small that you want to fill the whole display. So rotated or not you need 128, 256 or 384 pixels along some axis.

Nuts. I forgot Palm displays were square. Oh, well.

Yeah, it would have been great. Just mount a docking cradle on the dash. But I thought and thought and couldn't see a way for an existing PDA to do the job well. Some of the PDAs with keyboards would work. The old HP 100LX or 200LX were CGA (640x200) so 5x would work.

Well, the install is finished. It took about 2 hours to do the entire conversion including placement of the coax for the GPS aerial (but not the aerial itself, count about 15 mins extra for that)
The wiring harness needs only a very small modification. There's a plug (with only 2 wires) which needs to be replaced and that's all (the Comand uses a different plug for the CAN-bus).
When all is finished, you need to go to the dealer to activate the pictogrammes under the speedo (they do that with their diagnostics thing).
Everything works fine with the steering wheel knobs, just like if it was fitted at the factory. There's no difference at all.
See pic.

In the first picture you notice 2 holes for the airco and the radio. This piece of plastic needs to be replaced with a double din piece. In this pic, that piece of plastic is removed. Didn't take a pic of the new plastic (will do so when I install the empeg)

And finally ... the result.
(the wooden surround wasn't in stock, it should be arriving somewhere next week)

There has just GOT to be a way to get the empeg in there, too. Looking at all the space you've got behind that console, it looks like it would be fairly easy to scoot the nav down and put the empeg above it.

When I say "fairly easy", I mean in relatively easy in terms of doing custom bracket work and making a custom wood fascia.

Heck, maybe even just put the empeg under the nav unit. Looks like there should be room where that little wood panel is. You might have to move the gearshift to insert/remove the player, but that's better than hiding the player away.

Yeah, I'm gonna try to put it underneath the nav. The little wood panel is actually the ashtray. Underneath the ashtray is the airbag sensor though (visible in one of the pics) and I'm not sure if it clears the empeg. I'm trying to keep the wood panel (it flips up) to have a stealth look.
It's a bit scary to mock up the ashtray though ... oh well, let the fun begin

Frank

Underneath the ashtray is the airbag sensor though (visible in one of the pics) and I'm not sure if it clears the empeg.

Well, I was going to say you could relocate that "whatever-it-was", but if it's the airbag sensor, I guess it's not something you should be fiddling with!

I'm trying to keep the wood panel (it flips up) to have a stealth look.

Hey, now that would be really cool. We'd need pics of that for sure.

Aha, now you have no radio, just nav? Then empeg w/tuner goes to stock amp?

Well, where is it written that there must not be a margin on all sides?

Like I said - the PDA displays are so small that you really need to use the whole thing. The empeg's display is about 3.25" (83 cm) across while a typical Palm is roughly 2 1/3" (6 cm) wide. So we would only be using 4/5th of that (128/160) or about 1.9" (4.8 cm). Picture the empeg's display on your dash but less than 2" wide (and on an LCD display). I don't know about you but I think that would be hard to use.

No, the nav has a built in radio and Cd player.
And it has an aux input too (and TV and Telephone input).
So this means that I connect the Empeg to the nav and keep the Bose amp ! Woohoo!! Couldn't be better!
The empeg can't connect directly to the Bose amp so that problem is solved too.

Why not just get the best of both worlds and purchase a PDA and install GPS mapping software on it. Then you can have both your Empeg and your GPS navigation. Trust me, you will use your Empeg more!

There are two products available, which I have both. You can private message me if you want to know the pro's and con's of either.

Check them out at: http://www.travroute.com for Pocket Co-Pilot or http://www.destinator1.com for destinator.

The Desintator uses Navtech maps, which are the same the Mercedes uses from what I remember reading.

You can check out my setup at http://www.geocities.com/neo35faq

Jarred

That * does * seem interesting.
Are there maps for Europe for these?
Given the limited space on a PDA, how do they load the CD? Or does it only load your route and nothing else?
IOW, if I walk around in a big city, can it keep an entire map in memory?

Thanks
Frank