Rear View Mirror With Temperature and Compass
I'm always shopping at vehicle graveyards, looking for low-priced accessories to make my life better. Maybe it's a Hyundai Accent radiator fan repurposed as a very effective solar-powered attic fan or a garage entertainment system made almost entirely from car parts. My latest discovery: that the compass- and auto-dimmer-equipped inside rear-view mirrors in many 21st-century Subarus are self-contained units with no remote sensors of any sort, making them easy to transplant to other cars.
I've always liked the compass mirror in my
Murilee Martin
My main cars are an EG Civic hatchback hooptie and a Coach Edition Lexus LS400
with Toyota Celsior badging, but because I live in Denver I am required to own a Subaru (and a dog). I fulfill that obligation with a much-battered and dog-friendly 2004 Outback wagon, which has a really nice auto-dimming mirror with a surprisingly accurate compass built in.
This is a genuine grandfather-issued car compass.
Murilee Martin
As anyone who has traveled with me knows, I have no sense of direction. This isn't a big problem when your car has a genuine Old Midwestern Guy Grade™ car compass, which— thanks to my Wisconsin-native grandfather-in-law— I have installed in my Civic. Still, not all of us have the rich sense of hipster irony that is nourished by obsolete stuff like 8-track players and big clunky car compasses, and so there's a place in our lives for a quality digital compass in our cars. By far the coolest car compass is the green-fluorescent "digital analog" unit in the mid-1980s Nissan 300ZX Turbo, but this unit has about 40 wires, a remote direction sensor, and a big steel box that amplifies the sensor signal (I know because I have pulled one from a junked 300ZX and have tried, unsuccessfully, to make it work in another vehicle). Many newer cars have compasses built in to the inside rear-view mirror, but most of those have some kind of remote sensor that makes removal and installation a big hassle.
Subarus with these mirrors are easy to find in junkyards, especially in Colorado.
Murilee Martin
Then I learned from a friend at Subaru of America that the mirrors on the Legacy, Outback, and Forester models of the first decade of this century were port-installed units made by Gentex or Donnelly, and that all the circuitry that runs the auto-dimming and compass mechanisms is built-in. I wanted one for my Civic (to supplement the analog compass, of course). The Gentex mirrors used in Subarus seem to have Homelink garage-door-opener buttons installed, which I don't want, so I opted for the same Donnelly mirror in my Outback. So, I headed over to Littleton U-Pull, which always has plenty of late-model Subarus, and picked up the mirror from this smashed-up Outback. It's even easier to pick up a used, tested mirror on eBay, of course.
Prying off the on-glass mirror mount was difficult, so I'll just buy a replacement Subaru mount to glue to my Civic's windshield.
Murilee Martin
My experience with attempts to pry off mirror mounts glued to the windshield has not been good, so I'll just buy a replacement mount, glue it to my windshield, and snap the mirror into it.
The wiring harness on the Donnelly mirror is extremely simple.
Murilee Martin
The Donnelly mirror has this simple electrical connector, with just three wires. After a bit of online research, I learned that the blue wire goes to ignition power, the black one goes to ground, and the green one gets grounded when the car is in reverse (in order to disable the auto-dimming feature). I'm not worried about my mirror auto-dimming when I'm backing into a 747 with the landing lights on, so I'll ignore the green wire.
Hooking up my new mirror to power. Success!
Murilee Martin
Using the charging connector on the Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox as a power source, I hooked the mirror up to 12 volts DC via test leads. Success! It will be running on my soon-to-be-multi-compass-equipped Honda any day now.
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Rear View Mirror With Temperature and Compass
Source: https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/diy/a1839596/subaru-compass-auto-dim-mirrors-are-cheap-easy-upgrades-just-about-any-vehicle/