Hi All,
I put an Alpine 7" unit in over the last couple of days but i am unable to locate the handbrake ground wires for the screen off while driving. Can anyone help with this? I do not seem to see this question posted anywhere.

I bypassed mine, so don't know. I rarely have the slide out screen open on mine and even less often run video.
I do have Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift plus 500 mp3s on the custom DVD though :)

I had mine apart like this, but I didn't really locate the handbrake wire - what you may need to do is get a multi meter connected to earth and probe each wire with the handbrake up & down.
Or hopefully someone can point you in the right diretion and this image might help.
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b129/Ogier/Magna/IMG_0389.jpg


Oh, what car do you have though, maybe they are completely different between models.

Cheers, Oggy.

I think the switch itself is located on the pivot point at the bottom of the handbrake if you can follow the wires back to a more accesable location from there? Put bricks around the wheels if you remove the handbrake or anything to get to the switch.

you need to remove rhe centre console if you haven't already and you should be able to see it. why don't you want to earth it out? because it's ilegal?

Thanks guys, I had a bit of a look around their but their is not much room to play with. I have a 2003 TJ series 2. I just want to make it legal so i do not have any issues if they come up. I was thinking of just putting it on a switch if i can not locate this. I did not really want to pull any more of the centre console off.

I am open to other suggestions if you have. I could put a switch in the centre console or try and connect it to the drive cable on the shifter if this is able to be done.

are you really going to be watching dvds in the car? all it does when connected correctly is blank out the screen when the hand brake is released watching dvds not listening to music. what model head unit do you have? your able to turn the screen of manually if you want as well

I have the Alpine IVA-W502E Head unit with GPS and Bluetooth, Alpine PDX 4.100 AMP, Focal Polyglass 165v30 (30th anniversary splits) and Focal Polyglass 690CVX 6x9's. I also have a bulk Dynamat extreme pack to put in at some stage. I was more thinking of the DVD for the kids but i suppose they would be using the monitor out anyway. I just have it grounded at the moment and i may leave it this way as it seems too much trouble to find the hand brake wire. I would also be interested to find out if anyone has put a usb portable hard drive (say 500gb) on this system. No one can seen to tell me if it will work, they just say a usb stick and sd card will work but they are still a limited size.

i dont see why iy wouldnt work its still got a usb port on it, best bet is to give it a go

A USB HD might draw more power than is supplied from the USB connector on your head unit.
Only way to know for sure is to try though.

I've got a 32GB USB stick with all sorts of stuff on it.
It works on my Kenwood head unit, but takes about 2 minutes to catalogue the stick before it starts playing.

So if your 500GB is going to hold 15,000 MP3 files, it would take might take 10 minutes to start playing on my unit :)

Have a go if you have one, but I have heard of some phones only being capable of using up to a certain size memory card before they stop working properly. Also, I don't think portable hard drives have quite the same build quality as regular ones.