How much was the shipping? Are you going to run the microphone and USB cable down the bottom left? It seems from the instructions that there is an additional box you need to mount under the glove box? Would be interested to hear whether it fits in the original radio cavity.

 

Actually one more interesting question: now that you're driving a car with no PCM - what still works and what doesn't? Can you still see the maps in the dashboard? I'm asking because another - and much easier - alternative to all of this is to replace the PCM with a "real" aftermarket Carplay stereo -- but it's never been clear of what you'd lose. I know parking sensors for sure, but I presume that you can keep the backup cam (or just replace). The advantage for the aftermarket unit is that you can now get wireless carplay which is much easier, and the car would actually default to carplay every time it's turned on instead of having to long press a button, switch an input / etc.

 

 

Anyone?? Anyone??

 

$165 USPS Fedex International to send
$180 Returned

Its costly.. UPS wanted $425 - Shipped it thursday - received today

Nick is fantastic.. a project like this requires pretty good communication since its such a random location but I wanted no one but him touching this radio.. I believe we could to it ourselves but the money is worth having a pro do it.

couple hiccups for install but it was me.. systems works great although I have had a couple of times where the touch screen stopped responding but little error

 

Hey guys, update on my end. I bought the China kit and it got here a lot faster than the expectations set by the seller - I believe less than a week. It cost $360 delivered. It comes with almost no instructions, but I found a number of videos online and I watched them with the parts in front of me, and now I believe I know exactly what to do. I just need to find some time to do it, and I look forward to updating the community to see if this will work! I've mentioned this before, but I'm actually more nervous about running the USB and microphone wires and finding a place to put the carplay box than the opening up the guts of PCM part!

 

very Glad to hear all went well with your install,

i do agree Nick is great and very helpful professional, my kit is in the mail as i do/will not have the time /courage to remove my PCM , live without it for a week or so nor do the installation.
so will have a professional installer do that.

 

Just to update everyone that's interested. Apologies for the long delay on the how-to for this install. Had a hard drive in my PC go bad, so that took me out for some time. However, I'm back to it now and about 2/3 of the way through. Hopefully I can have it posted before the end of the month.

 

Hey guys quick update! I installed my China kit last night... it took me about 4 hours and at times it was very perilous. I got the whole thing plugged back in after playing around with the guts of the radio... turn on the car... the PCM won't turn on at all, completely dead. I thought for sure that I had destroyed it. I took it out, and did the whole process again of opening it up and re-doing all the cables I had installed... get it back into the car, and it works! And even the carplay works. Except there is no sound. It took me an hour to figure out that there are fiber optics cables that need to be moved from one wiring harness to another. Now the radio worked but the carplay had no sound. Eventually found a solution to that as well. Anyway, eventually got it all working, managed to get it to all fit into the same dashboard cavity, ran the cables cleanly and... seems like it's all working now! So, it wasn't easy particularly without having any instructions at all, and my stress level was extremely high at times when I thought I'd ruined the whole thing and had wished that I had sent the radio to Nick in the UK. But... for $360 I guess in retrospect I'm happy.

BTW: as noted in the other threads, I couldn't find a way to keep the Sirius XM with this kit. I keep songs downloaded on both spotify and soundcloud, so I personally don't care. I'm also not sure if my bluetooth works anymore. However, one of the tips from Nick was: you should disable your bluetooth anyway because the phone can only connect to one or the other. All the reverse cam, parking aids, etc seem to work fine!

 

if you have such problem after any LVDS interface installation in PCM3.1 or CDR+ check small connection loom on all sides, or replace factory one back to be sure in this check. routing from screen to mainboard, narrow one.

 

Update - I found out in the carplay system settings that there is an option to enable to disable bluetooth - thus solving the mystery. I've now been on a few trips with the car, and the apple carplay is a game changer. It's working great, and I'm very happy now!

 

Nice find, glad to hear that you enjoy the carplay,
looking forward to do mine, I am still in the process of installing my kit from Nick, as I need to add an iPhone dock in the ashtray location as well as update the Bose system