Steering wheel controls and elusive illumination...

[Nemesis04]

I've been able to obtain some steering wheel controls that illuminate for my VY. They have been bench tested and as it stands I can use a common ground for the remote functionality and for the LEDs.. my only concern would be that sharing a common ground would introduce noise, or pick up bogus resistance from the chassis. I'm interested to hear some of your guys thoughts as to whether this would be a concern... the more I think about it, the more I see there being a problem... /sigh

On the bench when power is passed through I can illuminate the LEDs and read correct resistances on my multimeter through common ground.. but... if this would have been introduced easily I'm surprised Holden did not make the minor modification in the first place.. this is also contributing to my doubt...

Regardless... The approach I would take is to feed 12V, when the parkers are enabled, through the existing Black/Yellow wire as seen on the left half of the attached image. This would be used as the substitute for the Brown/White wire on the second half of the image. Whilst the ground remote would be attached to the return ground wire that is shared with the horn, and chassis, and be used as the substitute for the black/yellow wire...

From what I can see they share a common ground any way as seen in the diagram and evident from the existing wiring of the controls, but an "independent" ground is also fed to the head unit.

Obviously pretty lights garner no functionality.. I just think they look.. well... pretty lol... it also gives me something to do.

What do you guys think?

On a side note, does any one have access to the factory wiring diagrams for the VY? I'd love to get my hands on them... but I understand if there is a reason why they would remain hidden.

[Nemesis04]

Well it would seem boredom got the better of me, so I just went ahead and completed the mod.

It's actually relatively simple to do, provided you have the correct steering wheel controls (or you can populate your original ones with the necessary components; 1 diode, 6 resistors, 6 LEDs and a few interconnecting wires)

When the new controls have been added to the steering wheel, only one wire needs to be cut and connected to another...
Both wires can be found on the radio connector, the brown/white (12v when parkers are toggled) and the black/yellow wire (the existing ground wire for the remote, which is shorted to chassis ground anyway after poking around a bit more). Cut the two wires, connect the black/yellow going away from the radio to the brown/white wire (ensuring that the break between the brown/white wire is connected again, assuming you want your radio to light up...) and you're done!

A lot of people I've seen have been replacing clock springs from cars with a flappy paddle gearbox to get an extra wire, but this is unnecessary.

[Meeso0743]

Great Work mate!