Brainiac 10" Tablet Mod - Who is rocking these?

NorthStyle

I have the V1 version in my car as well, and as husam2012 said: it's a bit involved, especially if you want it to sound good.

The paint I used was Duplicolor RBA100 flat black, but the Duplicolor PAE101 semi-gloss black is a close match as well.

You can order a JoyCon to have steering wheel controls work, there's a brief write-up somewhere on the forum that explains how to wire it up. I haven't cared enough to figure it out just yet but I did go ahead an order the parts. Heads up: they've been difficult to order in the States lately and had to have a friend in Germany order one directly from the company, then send it to me from there.

Back up camera/hands free... they're working on that but I just added the OEM reverse camera mirror to my Nismo; cost around $250-300 off of ebay but not a route everyone may want to take.

Problems.... not a lot, but enough to be frustrating.
1. With the V1 kits, if your tablet dies you have to take the entire center apart to pull the tablet for charging. There is a workaround where you can configure the tablet to power up once it sees power, but I ran into an issue where either a) it would take 5-10 minutes to do so then b) eventually, it wasn't pulling enough power to run the startup while powering the tablet so it would get halfway through powerup then shutdown and enter a reboot cycle indefinitely...

Solution: I added a USB "Y" so that I now have the option to plug my tablet in through the wall outlet in my garage so that if I'm not driving it often (which I don't), I just plug it in and it can sit.

2. Sound from the tablet's 3.5mm is garbage, plain and simple. I already had an aftermarket 4ch amp, however even when using the amp's built-in crossover, it wasn't enough to separate the frequencies so the sound was muddied.

Solution: I added a Clarion electronic crossover and used that for complete frequency separation before going into the amplifier.

2a. With that, the crossover was picking up interference from the 3.5 once the engine was started, but only when the car was running. If left in the ACC/On position, no interference whatsoever. I rerouted all the cables, checked all my grounds, etc. but couldn't get the sound to go away. I hypothesized that the sound was a product of pulling from the 3.5 or something to do with the crossover. I bypassed the crossover, and it went down, however it was still there (the crossover amplified the noise). So , I determined it had to do with the 3.5 outlet.

Solution: I added a DAC (NextDrive SpectraX) to pull sound from the USB of the tablet, and eliminated the 3.5 entirely. This helped out two-fold. First, the interference was completely gone. Second, the digital sound is on a whole other level above the analog provided by the 3.5.

2b. Another problem surfaced when using the DAC: the DAC was pulling power from the tablet (this was before I had a solution for Problem #1). So, due to the natural power drain combined with the power pulled by the DAC, the tablet would die overnight. Low and behold, the DAC was always pulling power, regardless if the tablet was charging or not (I had figured it would cease pulling power once the tablet went into standby but nope).

Solution A: I tried adding a USB On/Off switch inline between the tablet and DAC so that I could manually kill the connection, thus turning the DAC off. While this did help battery life, there was still some parasitic drain and the tablet would die after 2-3 days vs overnight. So this solution was a failure.

Solution B: I spoke with Workshop 12 and they recommended adding a Lava USB hub, with a caveat: the hub would need to be modified. This would add additional USB ports and the modification would ensure the power was killed once the tablet went into standby (the mod was just clipping a connector within the hub itself which took all of maybe 5 min start to finish).

With that, I had better sound, better battery life, and could keep the tablet charged when I didn't drive the car. However, shortly after Workshop 12 came out with their electronics box that solves most of the issues I encountered minus still pulling sound from the 3.5 would I'd still recommend going with a DAC.

Hope this helps

geeteezee

Great review, appreciate you taking the time!

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Girald

Yeah, thanks for that write up..

Im glad that the V2 is out. I suppose it will make life easier, though i prob envy you since the V1 might offer a bit more of an anti theft deterrent. I garage the car, but its not always in the garage.

Im not sure about what will happen with the bose system... i really need to crack open the FSM to see how its harnessed and amped if not just in the head unit. Ill start playing once the braniac deal shows up...so, thanks for the heads up on all of that... I used to be a sound reinforcement engineer for concerts and a light tech for 6 years, so this should be right up my alley. Another fun project



I did do a bit of research on the other items i need...

the back up cam....
I do have the sport tech - so i have a hard wired back up cam... Now i just need to see how the cam activates/deactivates from the OE navi unit. im guessing ill find the reverse signal on one of the harness pins - Otherwise, ill have to pull from the reverse lamp and get a 5v stepdown..

For the cam, it looks like i will need the easycap usb DVR to analog device... I actually found a model in amazon with a review from someone who did this operation on their car... Also,that dude used an app called USB camera and described how he used a usb extension from the easy cap to the usb hub , spliced out the red power wire and used that as a power toggle to activate the app and thus the camera when in reverse..

Ive seen similar deals on youtube... Im going to bench test the idea myself with some spare av equipment i have lying around this week.

The steering wheel control:
I did see that, and I see there are a few models for resistivity controls. I want to contact the makers if possible to see if the 1/2 price versions for resistivity controls only would suffice (the JOycon EXR)

FM radio ( and FTA TV for that matter):
I bought an FM receiver for USB that ill be testing when it comes in.. After using "nextradio" app in the past on my phone, im definitely going to want that for the tab. I can run sling TV all day, but it would be nice to pick up FTA TV also for morning news, etc.

Hands free phone:
My only beta solution here is to buy a cheap hands free device with a talk button and a 3.5mm (then fitted to RCA and out to the amps on a splitter), pull the plastic apart to expose the circuit board, solder in the steering control for phone pick up... if that tests well, ill hide it in the headliner or somewhere where the mic will work, and call it good..

Most of the testing should happen by the weekend... but I wont give a final result until its all in the car.

The FAB...
im all about paint these days. Knowing the color now, is more than 1/2 the battle.. I spent a week straight sanding and clearing a fly1 hood that was supposed to be fiberglass but turns out it was hex CF underneath. (a reject because of some bubbles in curing) Since the virus thing is happening I couldn't paint it, so what the hell, lets expose the CF for a while. It looks good

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AAM tt'ed // Soon: Moving back to the East Coast