Winnebago ERA 170M, 2017
The house radio is hidden in a cabinet. If you are taller than normal, you want that cabinet closed, because it really hurts to hit your head on it. (I'm 6'6".). However, with the cabinet closed the remote does not work.
I found lots of IR remote "extender" devices. Most were USB powered. Thus, I need USB power in that cabinet. The easiest way to do this seemed to be to install a 12v power socket in the cabinet.
At one point in the install I make a pretty dumb mistake. I'll point it out when I get there.
Also, if you happen to work at Winnebago, please ask your technicians to stop using a sledge hammer to install small screws. The number of stripped screw holes in my rig is frightening. Of 6 screws I had to remove and replace in this install, 3 were stripped.
There’s not much room in the panel housing the radio, so I decided to put it into the upper panel of the cabinet, near the touchscreen and the solar controller. I also had to find a 12v connection to the house battery, so first step was to remove the solar controller and touchscreen panel. Both were held in by screws, the touchscreen’s screws were hidden behind removable clip-on faceplate segments at the 4 corners. There’s tons of slack wire behind the solar panel, 2 of which connect to the solar system, and 2 connect to the batteries. The touchscreen is fed only by an Ethernet-style RJ-45 looking cable, so that was basically just removed for access purposes.
Some feeling around proved to my satisfaction that there’s nothing behind that section of panel:
I happened to have a hole saw of the correct size for the 12v power socket. Hole saws make less sawdust than drilling out the entire hole. There’s a support strut near the bottom of the panel, so I had to drill it a little higher than I desired.
The 12v socket has two leads, + and -. As luck would have it, the solar controller has two links to the battery system.
So, I made the connections. Can you see my mistake?
I’m an electronics engineer. In car electrical systems, and the world of electronics, black is almost always ground (-). So, I took this for granted and hooked the 12v socket’s ground line to black. As it turns out, I should have been more careful. In residential house wiring, black is “hot” and green is “ground”. The upshot of this is, at the end of my install, the first 12v-to-USB converter I plugged in was destroyed due to reverse polarity of the power lines. Once I figured it out I just reversed the lines in the back of the 12v socket
Once the cables are connected to the solar controller, that could safely be reinstalled. The order of operations here becomes very important. Pull the wires through the touchscreen’s hole, install the nut for the back of the 12v socket on the wires, THEN run the wires through the hole for the 12v socket, THEN connect the wires to the 12v socket.
Tighten down the nut behind the 12v socket, put the touchscreen back, and you’re done!
The exterior sensor was fed through the ventilation grate, so it would be visible from the sofa. The transmitter was attached to the interior side of the cabinet, such that it was close to the stereo. The mfg wanted it installed on the radio itself using provided clear adhesive but that didn’t work well in my testing. The loose wires you see in the photo are for the remote extender itself, plugged into the 12v-to-usb convertor, which is plugged into the 12v socket. Some adhesive cable ties are enroute from Amazon.
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