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In traditional "while I'm at it" fashion, I had the dash apart for other reasons so while I was cruising ebay I stumbled across a few LCD screens for sale meant for mounting in sun visors. I thought it would be pretty cool to be able to output my ECU software's virtual gauge display as a sort of "heads up" display for at a glance viewing by the driver and maybe play DVD's from my laptop for entertainment for the passenger. To my surprise, the parts were a lot cheaper than I thought. The LCD screen that I decided would work best was a 5" module with a very small depth available here from Parts Express for about $140 each. These modules ended up fitting very well in the visors in my 4000q. I looked at the visors in my 90 and I can confirm that they will fit even better in the 90q sun visor as it is slightly thicker and heavier duty. I have an image gallery available here of the installation process. After the screens were in place I needed some kind of AV distrobution box not only to allow multiple inputs for the screens but also to provide some interface for the sound to be played over my existing sound system. I did more searching on good ol' Ebay and found just what I was looking for. A mobile video tuner made by a company called 'XO Vision'. The model I bought was the XT-5050N which sells for about $100-150 new. With the dash out, installation was pretty easy. I mounted the tuner to a custom board that I had built for my ECU setup. The wires for the LCD screens (3 total: power, ground, and RCA video) I ran behind each A-pillar so the wires are barely visible. The screens come with a female plug but that took up too much room behind the A-pillar cover so I ended up soldering an extension cable onto the video lead to make for a flat connection all the way down to the tuner unit. The only other bits that I used in this setup was a set of 2 diversity antennas (each antenna has 2 channels and 2 outputs.. the controller accepts 4 inputs) so that my passengers can watch tv on long trips if they want, and some special clamps to support the extra weight of the visor with LCD screen installed. I can't remember who I bought the antennas from but the ones I used were made by a company called Farenheit. Here is at least one site I found in a quick google search that carries the antennas. The latches I bought from MSC Industrial supply, MSC part #00102277 (you need 2). Ignore the picture on that page as it doesn't really look like that. Just look at these pictures (1,2) for an idea of what it actually looks like. The picture in the printed "big book" catalog is correct. I couldn't find these at a local hardware store because of the orientation of the latch mechanism that I needed isn't typical of most cabinet hardware... So in summary, here is a quick breakdown of what I used and how much I paid (and where I got it from)
Grand Total: $476 All in all, not a bad price considering that an in-dash solution from clarion will run you about $2000, and that's for only 1 screen!
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