Introduction
This thread is sort of a continuation of a discussion I was having with a few other members on
this thread where a French fella had retrofitted RGB ambient lighting, but refused to share any details on how he did it. Having done some in-depth research into this retrofit, I came up with very little information on the subject and had to piece together various bits of knowledge from the RossTech forum and GolfMk7.
The basic problem so far is as follows....
- A Mk7 BCM does not support OEM 10 colour or 30 colour ambient lighting.
- Only a small selection of Mk7.5 BCMs support 10 colour, and an even smaller selection support 30 colour.
- It's incredibly difficult to retrofit a Mk7.5 BCM into a Mk7 car because the long coding has been moved entirely to adaptations.
After purchasing a supported Mk7.5 BCM and trying for several hours to sort out the adaptations, I gave up and decided to look for an alternative.
I purchased
a kit on AliExpress from VAGBASE/VAGEXPRESS (they're got a few other names too). My biggest motivation for buying this kit was the marketing of "Do not need coding, wiring, high BCM or high head unit".
Whilst the listing isn't showing on AliExpress any longer, they seem to have it on their own website
here. It's important to note that they seem to have a few different kits for our car at varying prices, but it's not clear what the difference is... for the record, I paid
£301.03 (GBP) and the kit was delivered to me in the UK from China
16 days after ordering.
The kit contains 17 individual lights, made up of:
- 4x Door Trim
- 4x Door Pocket
- 4x Door Handle
- 1x Dash Trim
- 4x Footwells
It also contains:
- 1x Main LED Controller
- 4x Slave LED Controller
- 2x Rear Door Light Diffuser
- 1x Dash Light Diffuser
- 1x Hole Saw (for door pocket lights)
- 1x Drill bit
- Various wiring harnesses
Originally when I bought the kit I wasn't completely sure how you would be able to get this to work in a Mk7.
For a short while, I was under the impression that the Main LED Controller would act as a Man-In-The-Middle on the CANBUS and act as the ambient segment of the BCM without needing to upgrade it, thus the MIB would display the ambient colour selection...
I was wrong.
In hindsight, I expected a bit too much.. but this kit does offer an alternative for pre-facelift cars, albeit not completely OEM.
The Main LED Controller has a few different configurations (controlled via 4 dip switches on the side of the controller), but it all comes down to your car as to which configuration you should use. They are:
- Mk7.5 OEM - main controller can automatically flash and code the BCM/infotainment unit, with ability to listen and respond to changes via the infotainment screen.
- Mk7/Mk7.5 non OEM (mirror switch) - in this configuration, the main controller is within the driver door, and the mirror switch is used to change the colours/brightness.
- Mk7/Mk7.5 non OEM (steering wheel) - in this configuration, the main controller is around the glovebox, and the steering wheel buttons can be used to change colours/brightness.
At this point I'd like to make it clear that
I have not fitted this kit yet. I'll be doing some preliminary test fitting in the coming days and will try my best to document it in as much detail as possible.
I've attached the Chinese instructions provided to me by the seller. I find that Google Translate does a good job of translating the entire document (although it does remove the images!).