Sunday, November 28, 2010

Why you shouldn't try to upgrade the radio in a classic Prius!

A few years ago I started what should be a simple project: upgrade the radio in my 2001 Prius. I've upgraded the radio in other cars plenty of times. It really isn't a big deal and the Prius was definately in need of an upgrade! It comes with a simple AM/FM radio with a cassette deck. The cassette desk is really only good to use as an adapter to connect an MP3 player. But even the cassette deck had broken. Plus, it was a pain to have to use the Prius touch screen to change radio stations.

I had grand visions! I wanted HD radio, so that I could hear all the cool new digital content waiting for me. I wanted bluetooth. (A big necessity since they passed the hands free law here in California.) Finally, I wanted a USB port both to play music off my phone and to charge the phone.

This is what the stock 2001 Prius looks like:


From the get go many of the buttons, such as the DISC and navigation buttons are dead. The radio itself doesn' t use a standard DIN slot, which should have clued me in that the road ahead was going to be difficult.

I went to a couple of the usual electronic stores; all said that installing a radio in the Prius was impossible. Of course I knew better having install at least two or three radios in my lifetime.

Step 1: check out the existing radio installation. (AKA destroy the dash.) Of course, in this step I didn't bother to check the Internet for clues of how to remove the dash, so I just started popping it out. Unfortunately after a few years of sun, plastic gets rather brittle. That combined with the fact that there were a few bolts and screws that I needed to remove meant that I ended up with a shattered dash.

My initial check revealed that the radio was more than just a radio. Behind the dash is a circuit board, and there are tons of wires going into radio. It was enough to discourage me and put the project on hold for a few years. (During which my son drove around a Prius with a pretty ripped up dashboard.)

A few months ago I picked up the project in earnest. (Nico left for college and I was again driving the Prius.)

Step 2: remove everything!

Note that there are a lot of connectors going to the dash. (Technically the screen also came out as well, but in this picture I had reconnected the screen.)

Step 3: cut a hole for the new radio. This is the dash circuit board. Most of the buttons on the board are now dead since they correspond to the old radio, so I should be able to just cut them out. I drew an outline of the hole and prepared the dremel for the cut. As a sanity check I took the board to my friend, who is an electrical engineer to make sure I wasn't going to screw anything up. He promptly declared me insane! So I abandoned this plan and tried to figure out a new way to mount the radio. (It was a good thing I talked to Mike, getting a new circuit board would be over $600!)



Step 3 (the real one): Extend the faceplate. I bought a Kenwood KDC-HD545U to install in the car. It has HD radio and I bought the bluetooth option to connect to it. When I first got it, I was annoyed that it had a removable faceplate, but then I realized that it was the key to mounting the radio.

http://www.kenwoodusa.com/Images/Cache/1740_200_82.jpg

The plan is to mount the radio inside where the old radio was, and then use an extender cable to allow the faceplate to be mounted on the dash and then pass the cable through the hole in the circuit board.

Note about the old radio: As a mentioned before the old radio is more than just a radio. Here is the radio opened up with the cassette deck removed:



On the back are two sets of connectors. The middle set goes to the speakers and power. The set on the left have something to do with the communication bus. If they are not connected to the old radio, the Prius display stops working. (This is the display that shows MPG and such.) So tragically, I still need to leave the old radio in the car with the wires going to that left connector attached.

Step 4: Making space for the faceplate. I bought a new dash from toyotapartscheap.com, pulled out my trusty dremel, and made a hole for the faceplate. I found that I had to go incrementally from the inside out and cut from the back. This is what I ended up with:

Here it is with the faceplate slipped in:


Step 5: Fill in the old holes and paint. I used Bondo to fill in the holes. I got the idea from doing research on the Internet on how others had dealt with this issue. I'd never used Bondo before. It is very cool! You can't Bondo over empty space, so I trimmed the back of the buttons and cut them when needed and glue them slightly depressed into their places to serve as backing for the Bondo. Once it dried I sanded it and painted. To paint I went to home depot and used their color match system to get some house paint of the right color. (I'm still a bit skeptical of the finish.)


Step 6: Mount the faceplate. By this time I really wanted to get this project over with. There is probably a better way to mount the faceplate, but there aren't a lot of options. There just isn't much inside to screw the faceplate onto, so I ended up just Bondoing it in.

Step 7: Make the extender cable for the faceplate. Incredibly they do not sell an extender cable to use the faceplate separate from the radio, so we had to make one. Once again Mike came to the rescue. He found a site that sells Kenwood electrical components: http://www.kenwoodparts.com. The part numbers for the socket and plug for the faceplate are E59-0860-05 and E58-1060-15. Once I got the parts, Mike soldered the 20 wires to the socket and plug. Incredibly, everything worked on the first try!


Step 8: Move the car alarm LED. There is this silly red led on the circuit board that blinks when the car alarm is armed. Unfortunately, it is right where the faceplate needs to go. It must be moved.




This turned out to be one of the most treacherous parts! I jabbed myself twice with the soldering iron.

Step 9: Put it all together. Now I connect everything up and pray that it works! There are a couple of things to make everything fit. First a couple of the light pipes for the display need to be trimmed. Especially the ones going behind the buttons behind the Bondo so that they don't push out the buttons and thus push out the Bondo. Yeah, it happened to me :(

I mounted the new radio where the old one was and let the old radio hang down behind the cigarette lighter and ash tray. I had to cut out the back of the ashtray to make room. (It's really a shame that I couldn't remove the old radio!)

Here is the end result:


To be honest, it looks a bit better in the picture. You can tell where I Bondoed and painted. (Especially since the light pipes pushed out a couple of the buttons.)

To conclude. Does it work well? Yes, it is awesome to have a good radio with bluetooth! I must say that the Pruis display is flaky though. Sometimes the MPG just sits at 99 MPG and it doesn't show the battery, engine status, and temperature. It comes and goes; I'm still investigating it. Was it worth it? NO WAY! It took me way too long and was much too stressful! Looking at these steps, it looks like a simple afternoon project. Maybe it is, if once you have a plan and all the parts, but it was not at all like that for me. I've spent many many hours and weekends on this. I am so glad it is over!