2001.5 Audi S4

Touch screen CarPuter install

Completed Feb. 19th 2006

First off the car:

Recently acquired (Nov 05) after the itch for a nice, fast car kept distracting me.  My first love of performance cars began with an '87 Mazda Rx-7 turbo and then later a '90 RX-7 turbo which I put a lot of work into but my living arrangements changed and an apartment without a garage wouldn't suffice for the maintenance of the car.  I sold the RX-7 in late '04.  I bought a '95 Audi A6 Quattro in March of '05 at an auction and fell in love with it.  It had every refinement I wanted except it lacked the performance aspect I had grown to love with the RX-7.  Throughout '05 I did quite a bit of research on Audi's and ended up doing quite a bit of work to the car with the indispensable help of forums like AudiWorld.  Nothing to serious but included struts, tires, O2 sensors, battery, gauge cluster lights, radio, XM, etc.  After the performance bug kept biting, I went and test drove quite a few cars.  Those included BMW 328i, Lexus IS300, Mazda RX-8, Subaru STI, Audi A4, and Audi S4.  I could go into all the details of each along with my likes and dislikes but most importantly once I drove my first S4 I fell in love with it.  I remember it perfectly.  It was a black 2000 S4 at the Audi Exchange in Highland Park, IL.  It drove like a dream and still handed top-notch.  Power was there nearly instantaneously with very little lag.  During my test drive I used every bit of the 250hp and 250 plus torque it had (needless to say I drove alone)  As everyone knows its hard to get everything in a car but Audi sure does a damn good job with their B5 S4s!  Yeah the STI was hella fast and the RX-8 was a blast to drive but both lacked the refinments of the Audi.  The 328 was a great car as well with a smooth shifting 5-speed but lacked the power I was after.  The IS300 sure was sexy on the outside but the inside was quite dull and the electronics look too cheap for a Lexus and more like a Toyota.  So... Now that I new the car I had to search out for the color/options I wanted.  Sure enough the one that fit my wants was the Nogaro Blue with the matching alcantara blue interior.  I had to have the newer B5 with the new badges and it had to have the cold weather package and the sport package with the silver mirrors.  And here I have it.  In my possession.  And I love it... I already have a AMS chip bumping up the ponies to over 300, EVO intake, and piggies (gutted precats).  Neuspeed G2 exhaust will be on within the next few days.

OK on to the install:

Well after all my interest, research, and hard work I finally have just about everything installed in my car. Still quite a few bugs to work out as well as a mounting the computer.

OK, here we go...

Brains:
Toshiba 6100 Satellite Pro
2.2 Ghz Mobile P4
60.0 GB HD
512 Mb RAM
Nvidia GeForce4 420 Go
WLan A/B

Front end-RoadRunner

Basically I took the screen off and just left the guts since I wanted to mount it under the glove box and also wanted it to weigh as little as possible.

Heres a pic of the dash I had to work with:

Radio removed:

After taking the radio out (which was quite a task since I bent one of the retaining clips) I found out the radio was very modular inside.  Both the CD and tape mechanisms were removable leaving me with plenty of space of other electronics for the task.

I wanted to retain the functionallity of the stock headunit so I basically relocated the faceplace seen below.

close up of the connection:  Used an old DB-25 extention cable so I could disconnect the face plate for installation

I also relocated the volume knob on the faceplate so I could keep it on the new faceplate with the LCD screen.

Once that was finished I began to work on the LCD.  The LCD was a Lilliput 7" touch screen.  Much of my knowledge is dedicated to MP3Car.  I didn't have enough room to keep the stock buttons so I opted to relocate the IR sensor somewhere.  While I was there I added the 'Auto-on' feature with a resistor and cap in place of the power button.  Below is the main controller board for the LCD screen.

Next on my list was to find a way of inputting sound to the headunit.  Since my car has a stock CD changer this task was quite easy to do.  I basically spliced into the CD changer input and used a 6 position double pole switch from Radio Shack to use as my input selector.  This way I can toggle between the CD changer, carputer, XM, and an Aux input.

Now I had to modify the notebook, mainly the power botton.  This was done by adding a standard 3.5mm phone jack to the side of the notebook.

I had quite a bit of fitment/clearance issues since I wanted to put the notebook under the glovebox.  the biggest were the plugs at the back.  Below you can see all the plugs were 'cut' down to take up less space.

I wanted to cut out a temporary faceplate to get a better idea of how to mount the LCD screen so I bought a rubbermaid container and cut one out and attempted to mount it

I really wanted to put a slot load DVD drive somewhere in the dash so I had to come up with another plan for the face plate.  Using a micrometer I measured out all the dimentions of my dash opening, DVD drive, LCD screen, etc.  Lucky for me, my girlfriend's dad is an excellent machinist and he helped me mill out the real face plate.  Unfortunatally we were unable to find the appropriate size stock in aluminum so we ended working with 304 SS.  I didn't get any pics of the actual mill we used but below is one just like it he has in his garage.

And after about 5 hours of work we had the final product.  We went through 2 2mm 4 flute carbide mills and one 3mm 2 flute.  Stainless steel is quite difficult to work with.

Spent another 2-3 hours polishing it with emory paper and a scotch pad.  I gave it some texture of opposing diagonal lines to make it look more professional since I wanted to keep the silver look (matches my aluminum trim in the car) instead of painting it.

And the fitment in my car:

Now another hard task of mounting the LCD screen in the headunit along with all the electronics and the faceplace.

Controller lying diagonally in the headunit case:

My apartment with parts everywhere:

And the final product! Notice the volume knob to the left of the screen

Now putting it in the the car with all the wires and feeding the power button for the laptop along with the input selector...... WITHOUT breaking the epoxy/hot glued faceplate/screen was a very arduous task.  I had to remove it a few times due to wiring issues.  Once it was in the car I had quite a bit of noise but I eliminated most of that with the use of an inverter and AC adaptor instead of a DC-DC adaptor (not want I thought would be the case) and a Turtle Beach USB sound card.

Full size pic at night:  Notice on the left (by my left knee) there is my power button for the laptop and the input rotary switch.  Notebook can only be seen in this pic as the 3 lights under the glove box.

Here you can see the stock faceplate on the passenger seat that I can use for the CD changer or FM.  This I store in the glove box when its not in use.

Well there you have it.  It was a ton of work and there still is quite a few bugs to be worked out.  Well worth it.  GPS, MP3s, DVDs, all in your ride. Oh and I can't forget Vag-Com! Questions/comments? Direct them to ME (pagrosse@yahoo.com)

© Febuary, 2006 Paul G.