Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011 show report.

CES 2011

blogger Latest blog entry

05/14/2012 06:42 AM
Do your 12v electrical work properly.
If you've ever dabbled in 12v electrics in your car, you've probably come across one of the enemies of electrical systems - the spiteful little piece of metal and plastic known as the scotchlock connector.
These things are marketed as the saviour of wiring for people who like to do their own modifications. The idea is simple. If you want to splice two wires together, and one of them is an existing wire (like a +12v line, you can use one of these connectors. One side snaps over the existing wire, and the new wire goes into the other side. When you crimp the metal piece it pierces the insulation on both wires and makes an electrical connection. Clip the plastic snap closed and you're done, right? Well - for now. But later on, that connection will fail in all manner of creative ways and you'll be left with nothing but trouble which, for the most part, will be very hard to track down. Scotchlock connectors need to burn in hell.
If you're going to do your own electrical work in your car, do it properly. Use bullet connectors or crimp connectors if you're cutting and splicing wiring. They're just as easy to use as scotchlocks but they're a thousand times more reliable. You need to invest in a crimp tool - looks like a pair of pliers with notches in the jaws - because pliers won't crimp the electrical connection properly. But the end result is secure wiring that won't vibrate or pull apart and won't create electrical problems further down the line. Everything from engines that won't start, to flickering lights, to fried engine management computers to non-working instruments. I've seen all these things caused by sketchy wiring from people trying to scotchlock a new radio into their car.
The attraction of Scotchlock connectors is that you don't need to cut the vehicle's original wiring to splice lines together to make a Y-connection. In reality you are cutting the wiring though, because of the metal blade inside the connector. So given that, just cut the wiring and do it properly. Take one end of the cut wiring and the new wire, and crimp them together into one end of the bullet connector, and take the other end of the cut wiring and crimp it into the other connector. Simple - that's a Y-connection. Clip the two connectors together and you're done. For connections that don't need to be taken apart again, you can use an even simpler crimp connector and just stuff two wires in one end and one in the other.
It goes without saying that any work you do on the electrical system is best done with the battery disconnected. Although if you're the type that uses scotchlock connectors, chances are you never figured out to disconnect the battery in the first place.
Chris - www.carbibles.com

Original post date: January 9th 2011
I've just returned from CES, or Nerdopolis as I like to call it. The Consumer Electronics Show is the single largest gathering of technology for 4 days a year, held annually at the Las Vegas convention centre. It's never open to the public, yet they turn over about 130,000 attendees a day purely from trade. I was there for my own personal reasons but also to scope out what was new and up-and-coming in the world of cars.

The only two car manufacturers to have an official presence at the show were Ford and Audi. Ford were showcasing the new Fiesta and Focus, or more specifically the technologies behind the two new cars including their Sync system for hooking up digital devices directly to the cars. Audi were showcasing their latest generation heads-up display technology (HUDS), virtual dashboards, entertainment systems, and full-electric vehicles (under their e-tron moniker). There was an e-tron Audi A2 and an R8 to drool over.

Plenty of other manufacturers were there in spirit though because their vehicles were being used by car audio manufacturers to showcase their latest wares. Plenty of Lambourghinis, a couple of Ferraris, some Fords, one or two Japanese JDM cars and a single Chevy Volt - oddly enough on the Verizon exhibit. Go figure.

Ford's new Focus and Fiesta Audi e-tron A2 Audi e-tron R8
Audi e-tron R8 One of the many Lambos One of the many Lambos

In terms of accessories, the north halls were full of all the small vendors - the home-brew types who typically nearly bankrupt their startups simply to get booth space at CES. I browsed all these stands - many from China - and turned up three items that I think the average car nerd would be interested in. The first two take two different approaches to the same problem - mounting your smart device inside your car.

The Convex Pad Company (Korea) had about the best solution I've seen. You know how most of the suction cup mounts require you to stick a plastic pad to your dash so their suction cup can use that? It's because suction cups don't work on textured dashboards. CPC have solved this problem by surrounding the suction cup with a slightly padded, tacky doughnut (for want of a better description). The stick material is a stronger version of what you find on PostIt notes and it means that the suction pad can create an airtight seal even with a textured surface. When you unstick it, it leaves no residue behind. They had clips and holders for just about every cellphone and GPS on the market, and a 'universal' design which was also clever. It was simply a non-specific bracket that you could rest any device in, with two tabs at the bottom to support it, and a blob of the sticky stuff on the back to grip the device in the bracket. I get the impression that CPC really are a startup - I think both of the guys behind the company were at the show, and of all the hundreds of mounting options on show at CES this year, theirs was far and away the best of the show. CPC car mounts.

Second best were Tetrax (Italy) who took a slightly different approach. Their version has a miniature twist-clamp that you can attach to one of the vanes in a dash vent (EGO and GEO mounts). The little claw is tightened by screwing the collar and the back of the collar has 4 high strength magnets in it. You stick a little button to the back of your device, and it then sticks into the dimple in the magnets. They also had a hard, rubber x-shaped frame (XWAY) that would fit around the outside of the magnet collar to provide four extra contact points at the back of your device to stabilise it so you could use it in-car (rather than simply using their system as a holder). Textrax gadget mounts.

The final gadget is for GM and Ford tuners. Everyone who's fiddled with their cars knows about the OBDII port and there are plenty of devices out there that allow you to retrieve codes, have realtime readouts and such but they all require a cable - normally an OBDII-to-USB connection to a laptop. SCT Performance have the solution for i-devices - their OBDII plug is a two-way bluetooth transceiver. You plug their device into your OBDII port, pair it over bluetooth with your iPod, iPad or iPhone and your device then has (via their app) realtime readouts from your car. Because of the accelerometers built into iPods etc, you also have the ability to do far more accurate acceleration and performance testing (because it is streaming data from the onboard system at the same time). And finally, their system allows you to performance-tune your fuel and ignition maps on-the-fly. They claim that they keep a copy of the "raw", unchanged maps at all times so if you cock something up, you can return to a known good state. But the idea is that you fiddle with some settings, then use their system to go and do a quarter mile run to see if it made any difference. Fiddle again, race again. etc until you end up with a mapping that suits your racing or driving needs, or you've cocked it up so badly that you need to re-install the stock maps. SCT Performance iTSX wireless vehicle tuning.