Category: Projects

Mercedes DAB Tuner NTG2.5 Retrofit Upgrade with Existing TV Antenna W219 CLS

I recently retrofitted a full NTG 2.5 entertainment system to my W219 CLS (see this post). Among other things, this system has the ability to receive DAB radio broadcast here in the UK by using an additional DAB Tuner module. I managed to source the genuine Mercedes part (A204 870 54 90) and fitted this into the car. This guide outlines the steps...

Mercedes CLS W219 NTG2.5 Reversing Camera

Since I fitted the NTG2.5 system (see this post) to my car I wanted to make use of the Reversing Camera feature. The headunit has a dedicated video Fakra input which the unit can be set to switch to when reverse gear is selected. This may need to be enabled in the Comand system – if you don’t have STAR...

W219 CLS55 AMG Comand NTG 2.5 Entertainment System Retrofit

After many months of planning and buying parts, I took the weekend to perform quite a major upgrade to the entertainment system in the CLS to the latest version of Comand available to the W219 CLS during its production run. Unforauntely, I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked as I got too engrossed in the job :P...

Asus EEE PC: Remote On/Off

I originally bought my EEE 701 PC intending to use it as an upgrade/replacement for my current Car PC as it is much smaller, consumes less power, and uses a solid state drive (SSD) for data storage (meaning no moving parts while booting the OS and frontend etc). There were a couple of problems I needed to overcome though –...

Car PC: Part 4 – The Installation

With the hardware set up and all the software systems configured, it was now time to install the whole thing into the car itself. The whole process took a while to do and was split into three main chunks: Wiring The first job was to lay down all the wiring. This included power cable, speaker wire and extension leads for...

Car PC: Part 3 – Software

Part three of the Car PC saga :D Now that the PC itself was up and running and the screen and mount were completed, it was time to work on the insides of the beast, so to speak: the software – the thing that makes everything work! The Backend The PC itself was based on an extremely cut down version...

Car PC: Part 2 – Fabrication

Introduction Following on from Part 1, this section is going to detail what I did regarding the most important thing in the project: the screen. The screen is the one thing that you and everyone else who uses the PC looks at all the time so it needs to be visible – but at the same not distracting to the...

Car PC: Part 1 – The Hardware

Intro After my exams had come to an end, I decided I needed a mini project to keep myself occupied for at least a few weeks, so I decided as any normal, sane and non-geeky person would, to put a PC in my car. I spent countless hours researching various components and determining what the best route to go down...