This menu pops up during ignition ON and can tell which tyre has low pressure. This itself was an achievement after all the experiment.
BHPian audioholic recently shared this with other enthusiasts:
Another first- Direct TPMS working on the car but partially
This is the first documented retrofit of a direct TPMS system on a MQB A0 Car with the MIB Regio head unit(Found also in countries like Brazil) and the 8 inch virtual cockpit(which is now offered as an entry level option in many EU spec models as well). Hence doing this was like a blind move with no guarantee of the outcomes. There are a few cars with the upgraded virtual cockpit which had direct TPMS so the assumption was I had to upgrade the VC as well to get this working. Keeping future possibilities of a VC upgrade in mind() and considering that the direct tpms kit was rather inexpensive and wiring was really simple, I started the work a couple of months ago.
The kit is like this:
Contains four wheel sensors and a central antenna. My first trial wiring the controller to the car was unsuccessful since the controller had communication issues with the car. Then again took the plunge and ordered a spare controller from a different seller and this worked. The wiring is very simple, you need a positive, ground, CAN L and CAN H which was initially connected to comfort CAN. But I couldnt find any option in the cluster to get a live display of pressure, leave alone readings.
Got the wheel sensors mounted in the beginning itself since even if they wouldnt work, the valve stems were rigid and looked much better compared to the rubber stems present earlier. After different experiments with coding and wiring, I realised that there was no possibility of a TPMS menu appearing in the cluster. Left the setup as it is and declared the experiment a failure.
A couple of days later, I started to office and saw the TPMS icon on the cluster and a pop up message that said ‘Check Tyre pressures’. I wasnt sure if this was a real warning or a false one. The tyres had lost pressure by 2psi all round and this warning went away after topping up the tyres. So first thing that worked fine. After more digging in and contacting a few people they were of the opinion that neither the instrument cluster nor infotainment supports pressure readouts and only can give warnings.
Last week decided to conduct another experiment, I intentionally started deflating one tyre to see at least if I can get a legit warning from the car and this is what I got:
I saw this type of pop up for the first time ever, whereas the earlier warnings were different. So now it was guaranteed that the 8 inch VC can actually show individual tyre pressure readouts. However I couldnt see the tyre pressures nor the indication of which tyre had lost pressure. This was one step forward with more to go. But in diagnostics, the TPMS reported the correct values:
Then it meant two things – Either the cluster isnt coded properly, or a potential network gateway limitation on this car. But if it worked on the high end cluster, it should work on this as well. Hence, tried one last thing – created a customised dataset and reflashed the TPMS ECU and voila:
This menu pops up during ignition ON and can tell which tyre has low pressure. This itself was an achievement after all the experiment. I also tried deflating other tyres and checked it worked accurately:
Now two things are still missing in the puzzle:
- Get a permanent display on the cluster
- Get tyre pressure readouts on the infotainment unit
But already happy and satisfied with the result.
Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.
