I have most wires connect but I have a few questions.

 

The Pioneer has a dimmer wire Orange/white and the GMCo also has the same whire but when I look in the C6 service manual at the connector pin out it states that the B4 pin is not used?

 

I connected both the parking brake and ground to the black wire on the GMCO. Why does Pioneer state to ground to body. Isn't the ground in the connector good enough?

 

Does the mute wire get connected to anything? According to the service manual the connector has a muit signal at B6 but the GMCO adapted does not have a wire there.

 

Backup camera- My back up camera has LEDs. Is the power and ground for the LEDs only or is it needed for the camera also? I was thinking of connecting them to the backup light. This should turn the camera only on when backing up. I realize this will eliminate the possibility of rear view any other time but I was un sure of connecting to the red ACC wire from the GMCO becouse of the warning in the instructions about current limits.

 

Thanks in advance for the help and comments.

the dimmer wire is not always in the car harness, this is a easy one to figure out, is there a wire on the factory side of the harness oppsite of the orange/white? if not then you will need to find a dash light that lights up when the headlight are on and tap in to the +pos wire of it, the baes options are somewhere like an ashtray, if you dont have this wire hooked up the unit is very bright at night (even though the unit will automaticly switch to a dark back ground instead of a light background)

 

some cars dont have a groung wire in the harness, they groung through the metal bracket that bolts them in, the ground in your harness will be fine

 

the mute wire will get connected if the harness you bought has a mute wire for the Onstar system to still function, however you will need to move the wire to a different pin in the pioneer harness and grounded if you want you be able to adjust setting, destinations, or watch videos while driving (i am assuming so since you grounded the parking brake wire) unless you do a "software hack"

 

unless the camera has two sets of power wire, the power and ground are for the camera too, i would recomend using the red wire out of the harness module to trigger a relay and use the relay to power up everything (the camera and the avic) this will take care of the current limitations (most of the new harnesses with modules come with a relay because this is such a big problem)

For your grounding question.

The reason why they say to ground to the body/frame of the car is for 2 reasons. The first has been addressed in the above post. The other is because your ground wire carries amps through it. When it comes to wiring electronics the power wire has to be large enought to carry the amp load that is required by the part that it is powering. If the power wire needs to be 18AWG to carry the required amount of amps so does the ground wire. The ground wire does not have voltage on iit because voltage flowes from the power source to the component (which provieds a voltage drop, or uses the voltage per say) and then to ground making one big circle.

 

Amps flow the oppisite direction, so from ground commponent then power source, again completeing a cirlce in the oppisite direction. So if the power wire has to carry 5amps so does the ground wire. When you connect multiple ground wire together and from that junction only haveing one wire connected to the chassis (ground) you are making the one ground wire (the connected to chassis) carry all the amperage that is required for all of the electrical components to opperate that are connected to tha one ground wire. For example the ground wire that you are going to connect to carries 5amps for the part that it is originally connected to. Then you connect another electrical commponent to that same ground wire and the new commponent also requuires 5amps. Not that one wire has to carry 10amps through it. Now if you connect a third component to it and it also requires 5amps to work now you have three things all requireing 5amp to work. 5x3=15 now the wire has to carry 15amps. If the wire can not handle the 15amps the wire will heat up and could possible cause a fire.

 

Now after all of that has been said the way you have it hooked up is fine. you are not coming close to hitting the amp capacity of the wire, but i just felt like i had to let you know. Sorry for it being long winded, but i teach aircraft electrics and electronic princepals for the Air Force so i am kinda predesposed into the long winded answers....SORRY

Thanks for the help.

I guess the ground is OK.

I try to find a wire for the dimmer.

I think I'll try the camera power from the back up lights. Closer to camera location and I don't think I'll use the camera other then for backing.

 

I thought that if the parking brake signal was grounded that you don't need the hack or grounding the mute wire with the 700 only the 900 and 90? If so guess I'll use the hack. Can anyone tell me for sure?

 

Thanks

I thought that if the parking brake signal was grounded that you don't need the hack or grounding the mute wire with the 700 only the 900 and 90? If so guess I'll use the hack. Can anyone tell me for sure?

 

Thanks

 

if you're only planning on grounding the parking break wire then you have to have the software bypass hack, if you don;t want to mess with the software then you need to do the hardware bypass, this applies to the three units

^^^ all true stuff^^^

 

the grounded parking brake wire alone is not enough, if you dont have a module to retain Onstar, then you should not need the mute wire for its intended use, and the hardware bypass is probably the easiest to do, all you need to do is move the mute wire, if you search for "hardware bypass" there are a couple of threads that have pictures showing how and where to move the pin. just make sure the bypass is for the F-series and not the D-series as the new pin location is different.