After installing a new HU I found that the illumination doesn't work. By that I mean when the vehicle lights are turned on the deck is supposed to have lights come on behind the buttons and dim the main screen....it doesn't.

So my question is where can I hook up the illumination wire going to the HU? I thought about tapping into one of the wires behind the headlight switch but dunno which one, if any, would work. I tried going to the passenger kick panel fuse box and there are no fuses for acc lights...they're in the engine compartment and I really don't want to go through the fire wall.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

I feel your pain...I hit the same problem, posted it on here a while back, but didn't hear any solution. It looks like they switched that control over to the CAN bus somewhere in late 05 to 06. If you look at the factory harness side, the pin the dimmer wire is supposed to be on doesn't even have a wire connected. Since mine doesn't use the dimmer but only needs to know if the lights are on, I've thought up running another wire from the trunk tapped into the license plate light or something.

 

Actually I managed to find a solution. The black and white wire coming off the dimmer wheel on the dash. I just tapped into that and it works...as long as I don't dim the dash lights too much. Because it's a dimmer signal, the HU illumination lights (behind the buttons) will go off if it doesn't get a strong enough signal...ie when the dash is set to very dim. I never dim the dash anyway so this worked fine for me.

 

you can use a relay and grab the Neg wire from the headlamp switch it is blk/grn

 

you can also hook it up to the +12v switched wire. It will turn the lights on when the deck is on, not just when the lights are on.