There are quite a few methods to up grade the infotainment capabilities of an old vehicle, and when most men and women flip to head unit upgrades to get new-gen devices like Apple CarPlay and Android Automobile, these deliver absolutely no alter to the facts that you get on the instrument cluster.
The digital dash thrust has extra or significantly less changed this in the previous several years, but as much as an older motor vehicle is concerned, the alternatives that are offered for their homeowners are extremely constrained.
A reverse engineer, however, has observed a way to split into the instrument cluster system offered on the 2006 Mercedes-Benz C-Course W203, at some point currently being capable to display screen tailor made text and messages, as well as new music playback controls.
This isn’t anything that everyone can do, there’s no question about it, but the developer has also printed the entire documentation on GitHub, so anybody with the suitable competencies and an older C-Class W203 can technically do the exact thing if they comply with the offered guidelines.
The hack is run by an Android tablet related to the Can bus in the automobile, a little something that also permitted the developer to customize extra functions of the C-Class, like the lights system.
At the close of the working day, a large amount of get the job done has been set into this project, so it goes with no saying it’s not some thing that any Typical Joe can just run to get access to their car’s instrument cluster backend options without having being aware of everything about coding or how the installed controllers operate.
And though for some it might look a lot easier to just swap the monitor in the automobile, this isn’t essentially attainable in the W203, and the developer himself describes that coming up with a new instrument panel is pretty substantially the only alternate to this reverse engineering project.
