the goal for this mod is simple: to be able to watch anything from my entire movie collection in the comfort of my own car via a western digital media player and western digital 1tb passport drive. hardwiring something like this to a vehicle’s unregulated DC electrical system was not going to be easy either. stage 1 photos inside!
first off, the contents to get all of this working:
- 10″ headrest monitors (not pictured, but already blogged a few posts ago)
- 2x brain unit for headrest monitors
- 2x wiring harness for brains
- 1tb western digital passport drive
- 1tb western digital HD media player
- 12v 3a cigarette power adapter
- twist-on wire fasteners
- velcro straps
- wire taps/spades
the first thing i decided to do was try to figure out what part of the cigarette lighter was the positive and which was the negative. now i’ve done this type of thing several times already but wanted to document the process anyway. found the positive and negative wires and made my cuts. i cut the negative prong off of the negative wire and made a notch in the upper cap so that my positive wire can come out easily for easy wiring.
velcro’d my 1tb drive to the media player. now it was advised against doing this because the heat from the drive could potentially damage the media player somehow. i looked inside. it’s a fanless heatsink system so possibly a usb fan is in order for the near future to cool this thing down.
taking a break and admiring my workplace. my messy messy workplace.
wired together the brain unit harnesses. each harness had a switched 12v, a regular 12v and a ground. decided to daisy the grounds together and both 12v and switched 12v together into one power tap. i don’t plan to try to run this without the keys in my car anyway. the media player has an auto-on function that i didn’t want to deal with. more battery life for me. yaye!
wired the cigarette adapter’s ground to some 18 gauge, notched the adapter and fed the wiring outside to the atmosphere.
notched the upper cap a little more and fed the positive wiring through the cap. there’s a fuse in between so there’s no need to worry about shortages or fires…i hope.
stage 1 complete. stage 2 coming soon!
Related posts:
Want to se part 2 soon!
Have you made anything to extend the IR?