Comfort electronics

Visually, current vehicles differ significantly from their relatives from the last century. What usually looks appealing to us has the disadvantage that the view out of the rear window becomes increasingly unclear. Fortunately, this can be compensated for by rear-view camera systems.

For this purpose, a camera is mounted at the rear of the car and wired through the car to the front. Wireless radio solutions are often requested by customers, but are usually only reliable if the price of the device significantly exceeds the labour required for hard wiring.

There are three options for reproducing the camera image:

1. An external monitor is mounted on the front of the dashboard. Although this solution is simple and universal, it is often not appropriate for visual reasons.
2. Retrofit car radios that have a TFT or LCD display almost always have a connection socket on the back of the device onto which the signal cable of the camera can simply be plugged.
3. If a factory radio or navigation screen is installed, we have numerous modules on offer that make it possible to feed the camera image into the factory multimedia system. The switchover then takes place as soon as reverse gear is engaged.

All retrofit car radios today have USB ports. These can be used for a USB stick as a music storage device. Often, an iPod or iPhone can also be charged and controlled via the charging cable.

If the original radio does not yet have such a connection, there are usually two retrofit options:

1. In many current vehicles from BMW, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes and Volvo, all audio-relevant components (CD changer, radio, amplifier, hands-free kits, etc.) are connected to each other via a fibre-optic cable (optical fibre). If you now want to retrofit a component such as a USB port and control it via the radio, you need a converter that converts the audio signal into light signals and feeds them into the system. The result is perfect integration, which is, however, considerably more expensive than with classic analogue systems.
2. In many vehicles, a USB port can be installed as a CD changer replacement. This then uses this input and makes it possible to access the USB stick from the original radio. However, the control options are limited: The selection of the 6 CDs then corresponds to the first 6 subfolders on the stick and the tracks can be flipped through one after the other.

In 2003, an attempt was already made to replace the old analogue radio with the new digital standard "DAB". DAB makes it possible to listen to radio in almost CD quality and to listen to many new stations with a wide variety of content.

Unfortunately, it did not catch on at the time, because the broadcasters wanted to wait for the distribution of the receivers and the equipment manufacturers did not want to sell radios without a developed transmission area. A few years later, another attempt was made with the "DAB+" standard. This is now also used by a large number of customers and will sooner or later replace analogue radio reception.

We also offer DAB modules to add this function to your radio or radios that already have an integrated DAB receiver. It is important to note that DAB receivers require their own antenna. For this purpose, you can install roof antennas, glue windscreen antennas to the windscreen from the inside or use so-called splitters to make the analogue radio antenna additionally DAB-capable.

Since we have been working intensively with vehicle electronics and comfort equipment for over 15 years, we are naturally also specialists in retrofitting special equipment such as auxiliary heating, trailer couplings and cruise control.

We also have the VCDS system, which enables us to individually programme the equipment on vehicles from the VAG Group. Where one customer would like his fog lights to be 20% darker, the next customer might want the windows to go up automatically when the rain sensor detects a rain shower. No problem at all!