Headunit from a 323 in NA8 - illumination problem

[Kev_T]

A question for the electrickery/audio experts: I've installed a standard headunit from a 2001 323 in my '94 NA8 (to keep a standard-ish look but with a CD player...plus it was free!). I spliced the wiring using the colour codes that are readily available on the net, and I impressed myself when everything worked straight away. Well, not quite everything, the illumination with lights on doesn't work. I connected the TNS wire on the NA loom to the TNS input on the 323 headunit, and I'm getting power to that input with lights on. However the 323 headunit has a "dimmer" input and the NA doesn't and I suspect this might be causing the problem. Does anyone have any ideas? If it is the need for a dimmer signal to trigger illumination what's the best fix? Cheers

[hks_kansei]

Cant help with specifics, but here's a site with pinouts for most of the common Mazda head units from 1990 to about 2005

http://mazda-speed.com/faq/audio/

[project.r.racing]

You are correct about the dimmer feature. When the head unit gets acc power, the lighting in the head unit will light up. It does have a feature (wired) that when the parkers/headlights a turned on, then the HU lighting will dim.

You can either run a relay through you headlight system to make this feature work. Or just tape of the wire from the HU, and never have the dimmer feature work.

I'm trying to think back to my Astina, cos from memory the original after market HU installed was wrongly wired up. I think both the acc input trigger and the dimmer trigger wires were both attached to the acc wire. So it ran dimmed all the time. So if you find it too bight, you could attempt that.