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Exterior Entertainment Center Upgrade
Earlier this year, I decided to upgrade the exterior entertainment center. The original head unit was a Jensen DVD player, and while it worked ok, it was extremely slow loading DVD’s and lacked the ability to stream music via Bluetooth. While the DVD issue could be lived with, the lack of Bluetooth was an issue as I really enjoy music and have a large amount on my phone.
Looking at replacements, I quickly learned that a Single DIN unit that could play DVD’s were rare and costly, but a double DIN unit was very common and reasonably priced. I decided while I was at it to replace the speakers as well.
There is a fair amount of gear that will work depending on personal preference, but I went with:
Pioneer AVH501EX
Pioneer Double Din mounting kit
Batige USB Port
Polk DB461P 4x6 plate speakers
Microbypass Video override for Pioneer Recievers (more below)
With the above, I pulled the exterior stereo and brought inside. The mounting area looked like metal, but once I removed it I could see it was simply vinyl wrapped wood. First task was to mark the area for the stereo and enlarge the hole for the new unit. Admittedly I’m not the best at sawing, so I marked the area with masking tape to ensure the hole didn’t end up larger then needed. The excess vinyl covering is easily removed with a razor blade, score the edge and it peels right off.
Next was the speakers. For some reason 99% of 4x6 speakers do not come with grilles, so I wanted to reuse the OEM ones. The good news, the screw holes on the grilles lined up perfectly with the new speakers. The bad news was the old speakers screwed in “on top” of the mounting board, the new ones would sit differently and didn’t have the clean look I wanted. So, I marked the area (again with my friend blue masking tape) and used my dremel tool to “router” the area so the plate speaker could sit flush. While the routing isn’t 100% smooth, it’s under the speaker so yo can’t tell. Speaker Grills on top and good to go. (The corners of the speaker plate do slightly show past the grilles but close enough and with how dark all the colors are it’s hard to see all installed)
The Pioneer unit has a USB port and 3.5mm “headphone jack style” plug on the back, and comes with a long cable, designed for you to route somewhere in your car (glove compartment, center console etc). While I could have run this and left at the bottom of the entertainment center, I wanted to keep clean and used an additional USB port. Simple matter if drilling a hole and screwing in. The add on port I used has a USB and headphone plug in it, so both sources are avail from the Pioneer unit.
Last step was to solder the wires and connect. This is where the motion bypass switch comes into play. Pioneer has a cable in the wiring harness designed to be connected to the E brake, the idea being the unit will only play video on the screen when the e brake is on to prevent you from watching video on the screen while driving. While it will work without this connected, it puts a warning on the screen every 10 seconds and otherwise is a blank screen. This can be annoying as many of the controls are on the screen when playing DVD’s. The bypass connects to the often unused power antenna lead from the stereo wiring harness and uses that signal to trick the unit into thinking the ebrake is on. This was easier then trying to run wires all along the coach. Given the entertainment center is only used while camping, overriding this safety feature doesn’t cause any harm.
On a side note, my Vista has a similar Pioneer in the dash with the same warning when playing DVD’s, even while parked which tells me Winnie never connected the wire to the Ebrake, I may add another one of these to that stereo to avoid the warnings when the kids watch a movie while camping. (My TV inside is blocked while the slide is in so again this won’t cause harm as you can’t use while driving anyway, but would be nice to get rid of the constant “DANGER” warning)
I’ve included a few pics of the process and the final install. I don’t have any “before” pics but I’m guessing most of the outside centers look pretty similar across the various models from pics I’ve seen online.
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2015 Winnebago Vista 35B. "The Vistabus!"
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