Thread: 2009 Cobalt - basic straight forward install - simplest route

Originally Posted by cmotors

It should, assuming that you have either of those fuse ports, and they are active. As long as:

1) the power is active in those fuses when you turn off the car by moving the ignition to off
2) that you lose power on those fuses either when the car door is opened, or 10 minutes passes (whichever comes first).

If so, then yeah, it should work running to the fuse instead of the ignition.

Do you have any problems with overloading the wire in the fuse box. Cuz say i use the sunroof fuse, that line is only designed for 10amps and if you use this circuit to fuse plug your adding another 10amps for the deck and sunroof. I just wanna make sure I won't burn out or overload the wire cuz that's a big job to fix haha. Do you have any problems with overloading the circuit or have a way around it? Btw thanks for the help

Originally Posted by bik0304

Do you have any problems with overloading the wire in the fuse box. Cuz say i use the sunroof fuse, that line is only designed for 10amps and if you use this circuit to fuse plug your adding another 10amps for the deck and sunroof. I just wanna make sure I won't burn out or overload the wire cuz that's a big job to fix haha. Do you have any problems with overloading the circuit or have a way around it? Btw thanks for the help

I hear ya. Better to be safe than sorry, that's for sure. The ignition wire really isn't drawing much of any power. It is only for determining if there is power active on the line. If it sees power, then it tells the radio to turn itself on using the actual hot wire, which is typically the yellow wire. This hot wire is what pulls the power to run the radio. As long as you are tapping with the correct fuse and gauge of wire rated for the amount of amps, it shouldn't be a problem. I avoided using the sunroof fuse because the fusetap that I bought was not rated high enough for the amps found on that particular fuse.

But again, the radio ignition wire is not drawing power from that line, only sensing whether there is power on that line and using it as a cue to tell itself when to power on, and when to shut off (when it no longer sees power on that line).

Originally Posted by cmotors

I hear ya. Better to be safe than sorry, that's for sure. The ignition wire really isn't drawing much of any power. It is only for determining if there is power active on the line. If it sees power, then it tells the radio to turn itself on using the actual hot wire, which is typically the yellow wire. This hot wire is what pulls the power to run the radio. As long as you are tapping with the correct fuse and gauge of wire rated for the amount of amps, it shouldn't be a problem. I avoided using the sunroof fuse because the fusetap that I bought was not rated high enough for the amps found on that particular fuse.

But again, the radio ignition wire is not drawing power from that line, only sensing whether there is power on that line and using it as a cue to tell itself when to power on, and when to shut off (when it no longer sees power on that line).

Thanks again, you really helped me out

Finally got around to doing a few more things with the carputer. One of the things I did was replace the un-shielded VGA cable with a proper shielded one. It makes a big difference in the video quality. I also installed a USB port, which I've been wanting to do a for a long time. Having a usb cable running over the seats from the back to the front gets the job done, but it certainly isn't ideal. The biggest delay on that front has been finding an in-expensive solution that can install easily, be very sturdy, and doesn't look like a donkey's arse. Most of the options I've come across were a bit expensive due to shipping across the border. I managed to find a connector local at $8.00 CAN apiece, with pickup option for no shipping cost. It's a 2 piece solution which consists of a die cast metal bezel (2nd picture), and a snap in coupler that goes from Female A on the front, to Female B on the back (4th picture).

So far, I've run 2 usb cables from the front dash to the trunk, and have installed one of the ports. Didn't have a lot of time, so I'll install the other port later which shouldn't take long, since most of the work has been done. It will go to the right of the first port.

On your guys' newer cobalts, u should be able to use the "RAP" line as your remote line ignition on/car off door opened turn pc off source.

my 07 baseline ****es me off as the radio was controlled by CAN, and while I have provisions for RAP they are not actually functional. :-( meh doesn't matter though, i like the way mines wired.

Just a heads up, I used an ACC line on my M2-ATX switch and it worked good for awhile but eventually screwed up the M2 timing circuit. I think because the ACC line is 12v+ when ignition goes on, but then goes to 0v during crank, then 12v+ when the engine starts. After awhile I think the M2 gets confused which is why I believe they recommend connecting the switch to an ignition line which stays 12v+ during on, crank and run.

Just speaking from my experiences.

Thanks for the heads up. It has been 8 months so far, and haven't run into the problem yet, but will certainly keep an eye out for it. What are the symptoms that you see when that happens?

Decided that I was getting really tired of the long boot times for this system, so I went and got a 128GB SSD drive. The one I bought was a Crucial RealSSD C300. Was running XP originally, but went ahead and updated to Win7 for a fresh install on this new drive. Win7 has some support for SSD drives like TRIM. Man, this thing smokes. From the time windows starts to load, to the time that DFX is loaded is 15 seconds. The windows boot animation doesn't even have time to fully form. Now that is sweet!!!

About 4 months ago I bought a Logitech c910 webcam and installed it in front of the rear view mirror. Here are a couple vids I captured with it using minicam at 720p 30fps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZZMMUcXeqc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3301swLshU

This it's an awesome setup. By any chance were you able to use the stock wheel controls and Bluetooth?