DanielFD

So.. Ive been hacking away at my car trying to figure out a couple things.. A friend(on this forum) and I bought a Chinese star diagnosis laptop and multiplexer and we have discovered a couple things.. We were able to enable passive tire pressure monitor (uses the esp readings) and cornering foglights and change the sound of the alarm chirp when locking and a couple interesting things. Also at the same time i retrofitted an interior dimming mirror on my dads w164 ml350 and now i have an extra mirror with a yellow ambient light. I always loved ambient lighting but my 2004 clk doesnt have that little yellow light in the mirror.. or so i thought. I took a look and noticed there was a hole in the mirror and when i shine a light in there i noticed a yellow bulb so i was surprised.. But it doesnt work.. Im guessing maybe the previous owner retrofitted a new mirror but the bulb is burned out. Before i take out my mirror and maybe break it to change the bulb i wanted to know if pre facelift cars actually had this light in the mirror? Maybe its deactivated somehow and needs activation through star.

DanielFD

BUMP, just need somebody with a pre facelift US spec CLK to look under their mirror for a little hole.

megacrazy

What's your question? Do pre facelift CLKs have an amber bulb that's in the mirror? The answer is yes. Most likely the bulb is out. Replace it.

Which Chinese version did you buy? The ebay ones? How's it working so far?

DanielFD

Thanks man just wanted to be sure. Yea chinese knockoff, i live in lebanon.. Sadly no ebay.. But their are a bunch of suppliers who sell them setup with ibm laptops running windows xp. I got the C3, got a great price on a used one. Totally worth the investment. With WIS im basically able to do whatever i want with my car without having to be ripped off by shops.

Thanks again for the simple answer.

megacrazy

No problem.

So no issues with the C3 so far? I'm thinking about investing in a chinese one off ebay but haven't seen any reviews so I am a bit hesitant.

Rudeney

I have the Chinese C3 and it works quite well. Just get the "virtual" version - that way you don't have to dedicate an entire laptop to the software. Plus, you can install it on any PC, and then have access to WIS and EPC any time you need it.

DanielFD

Rudney is right (always right) the virtual HDD is much easier might be marginally slower but you don't end up with an old laptop that's on the edge of breaking down. I have a Chinese C3 also very happy with the results. I was setting up a Jaguar scanner for a friend (SDD/IDS), you wont believe how much more superior Mercedes's solution is compared to Ford/Jaguar.

megacrazy

Oh ok great. I'll look into getting one. I was afraid of limitations with the unit itself...these Chinese electronics are hit or miss. I'm not too worried about the software/laptop aspect of it as long as the Chinese parts cooperates.

Can't wait to get rid of the SOS not activated message...or whatever the hell it says

Rudeney

For live use on the car, I have a Dell D630 laptop since it has an RS232 port. It's pretty beefed-up - 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD and runs very well. For general reference purposes, I have it installed on my Lenovo Yoga, also with an SSD. I've found SSDs make a huge performance improvement when running virtual systems.

DanielFD

something to note though, you want a Chinese knockoff with developer mode enabled to access some interesting things. I read somewhere that all Chinese knockoffs have developer mode but I don't know how true that is.

Rudeney

Mine does. Also, I had a fellow forum member send me a copy of his 2014. It was not the virtual version - he had to install the hard drive in a Dell D630. I tried to virtualize it, but I have had issues with activating the software. i have all the key generators, but nothing seems to work. I haven't played with it in several months, but I may mess around with it some more on one of these cold, rainy weekends.

DanielFD

If the STAR is anything like the the Jaguar scanner (SDD) then activation is done through background process maybe the software isn't configured correctly; I'm guessing a firewall issue.

DanielFD

sooo I finally got the time to fix that ambient light. couldn't find any yellow small bulbs and didn't want to switch to LED and put in resistors that might get hot and not even get the right amount of light. I got a normal(warm tone) bulb and covered it with clear nail polish (marker ink wouldn't stick to naked glass) then painted the nail polish with orange marker then gave the bulb another coat of nail polish and installed! Works great!

floridawriter

After reading your post I looked at the mirror in my 05 CLK55. It also has a small hole in the center underside of the mirror and looks like a yellow unlit bulb up in the hole. How did you go about disassembling the mirror?

Thanks in advance!

DanielFD

https://mbworld.org/forums/c-class-w...ew-mirror.html

NewShockerGuy

Can someone post up exactly what to get from Ebay with the developer mode?

I would like to enable features on the Merc and play around with the system. I heard we can do gallons left in the tank, and some other things that aren't normally enabled...

Thanks,
-Nigel

Rudeney

I'm not sure, but the copy of SDS I have has developer mode enabled. The keygen utility it came with does that. The only thing it can't do is override the expiration date, so I just have
to set my date back to 2010 to run the "Xentry/DAS" functions. Since I run in a VM, it's not a big deal. I know there was a guy around a couple of years ago claiming generate a key (for a fee) that would also override that, but I never did that. No reason to as I just wrote a batch file that sets my date back when I start it.

DanielFD

https://mbworld.org/forums/clk-class...star-mods.html

I opened this thread in December, nobody seemed interested.. haha

Rudeney

I don't think many people around here use SDS. Now, hop over to the R230 forum and "everybody" has a copy.

DanielFD

Will Do!