I finally finished the upgrade of the navigation unit on my 2009 v8 vantage.
It's nice to have a touch screen and a unit that is actually useful.

 

Please provide more details and the final product in the car. Would love to see how it looks. What unit is this?

 

+1 very interested in the details and pics!!!

 

+2

Part numbers? Source for parts? cost? etc

Illustrated DIY would be ideal :P

 

I started with a magellan smart GPS 5295. It fits perfectly in place of the original screen and is a state of the art touch screen unit.
I had to gut the entire original screen housing, shave down the sides of the new GPS unit and fit it in the original screen housing.
I drilled a hole in the back of the housing for the sound to come through and hard wired the gps so it comes on whenever the ignition is turned on.

Bad part was I couldnt figure out how to make the screen go up and dome with the ignition so I had to wire it to a remote so with the press of a button it raises and lowers.

Here are some pictures.


I posted a video on u tube of the finished product

 

Great work, thanks for the writeup!

 

Looks awesome. Good job and thanks for sharing.

 

I'm just curious: On my car, using a touchscreen would be a long reach where the nav display is currently located. Then there's the constant smudging of the nice piano black waterfall fascia. How do you deal with these?

Before I sold my 07, I was actively looking for a spare center console bezel (the panel with the radio buttons, cd slot, etc). My plan was to remove the cd changer, carve out the panel and make a custom mount behind it to install a black iPad mini. The ipad would fit width-wise in the landscape position above the a/c controls and tying it in with a Dension Gateway 500 would give you a full multimedia/Nav system with a nice touchscreen interface. You can even have a nice Aston logo for the wallpaper and lock screen on the iPad which will display on power up.

Maybe someone else will pick up the project idea now that it is a moot one for me.

 

I seem to remember seeing a video of a vantage that moved a large screen to the center console. I actually did this with the Porsche 928 using a large system with the touch screen and it looked great was not too terribly expensive, about $4000 installed but it was many years ago when the systems were more expensive. I recently put a Kenwood system in my wife's A2 for about $2400 installed which looks like a factory unit. Looking at my vantage there's no way I would be able to reach the touchscreen and be safe but then I am 62 years old and not very flexible.

 

Nice work! Probably about as integrated as we are going to get. Meanwhile I still have my iphone just sitting on the ashtray lid.

I am amazed AM in later years didn't make a plug & play module to replace the factory pop up screen. Or some other 3rd party to just repackage a Garmin. Probably just too small a market.

Tempted to get the Escort Smart Mirror and solve my GPS & backup camera issues. The mirror is close enough in our cars the small screen may not be an issue.