Audi A3 Door Puddle and Warning Lights

My 2015 A3 2.0 Quattro (A3 8V body type, of the MQB chassis) did not come with the optional ‘interior light package’, which in the US is part of the very expensive ‘Prestige’ package.  However, there were some nice bits that it has that I missed from previous Audis I’ve owned.  There are several parts to it, which I’m slowly retrofitting as I find more things out about my car and source the parts (many of which are coming from China or Germany).  One that had a lot of people on the forums stumped was the puddle and exit light coding for the rear doors.

For my front and rear door exit and puddle lamps, I sourced the parts from AliExpress.  It took about 2 weeks for the parts to arrive but it was all very nice with pre-built harnesses wrapped in the German-style fabric tape, all terminations complete and the LED lights were all branded VAG (Volkswagen Audi Group).  Installation was straight forward with just popping out the original reflector and then cutting out the indentation in the bottom of the door panel.

For the front electrical, you’ll plug the prebuilt terminal into slot 16 on the terminal block and pin 5 is ground so you’ll splice into that, preferably with solder and fuzzy fabric tape.  It’s pretty obvious how to route the wires and you may want to wrap the new supplemental harness in with the factory harness.

Some nice illustrations are here:  

http://garage.jenare.com/pack-eclairage-dans-les-portieres/

One thing to note is that most people have reported that after you’ve reassembled and coded it with VCDS, you will need to power cycle the ignition for it to take effect.

There’s more information on the front door panels online and in the forums than there is in the rear.  In fact, the rears have some conflicting information so I can tell you what worked in mine.  My car has rear door modules so you’ll extract the individual white terminal block from the plug that goes into the door module and drop the positive feed for the harness into pin 12 of the 16 pin connector.  Then you need a ground and pin 13 is a brown wire, which is typically used in VAG cars as the ground, so I spliced into that and soldered it.  After reassembly, the door controller has to be coded to acknowledge the light and turn it on when the door is opened.  Again, the front doors were simple (using VCDS).  The rear doors need to be added via module 19 in the installation list, you’ll add BB & BC, close the controller and go back in to the module list.  Then you’ll see the rear doors.  These will only be temporarily added as you’ll need to remove them from the installation list once you’ve coded them.

Now, go into each door module and go to Long Coding.  Copy and paste the existing coding into a text editor document that you won’t lose.  You always want to be able to go back to the original configuration if something goes awry.  Plan for the worst and hope for the best.

In my case, the original coding was this for both rear doors:

004117204000048000000002

I then edited the 4th from the left digit to be a ‘5’.  This is the only change I had to make.

004517204000048000000002

Below is an image borrowed from the Ross-Tech forums for a different model but similar car that illustrates the entries.  As of right now on my A3 8V using VCDS v. 15.7.4, there are no label mappings for the rear doors.

As soon as you commit the coding, the rear lights should be active.  Don’t forget to go back into module 19 (CAN) and uncheck the boxes for BB & BC.

 

Parts to purchase:

AliExpress LED Door Light Kit:  http://www.aliexpress.com/item/1-set-OEM-Audi-A3-LED-lamp-foot-stepping-foot-nest-lamp-lights-footlights-Package/32482255651.html

Necessary/Suggested Tools

VCDS or ODIS hardware and software coding

Torx driver set, I believe T20

Interior panel removal tools (I got mine from ECS Tuning)

Wire splicing mechanism, solder and fabric tape recommened

Time to Complete

The first door took me about 45 minutes on the hardware, each subsequent door was about 20 minutes, then about 15 minutes to code it with VCDS

How to improve autocorrect on iPhone and iPad

TechRadar: All latest feeds How to improve autocorrect on iPhone and iPad

Even if you've never experienced a full-on, mortifying 'Damn you, autocorrect!' moment, you've probably still had irritations with the system on your iPad. We happen to think it's quite good, but even if you opt to switch off the Predictive engine it's still useful to know how to manage autocorrect.

The first thing to remember is that you can cancel corrections either as they're happening or just after. When you're typing a word, and the autocorrect thinks it should be something else, it will highlight the word and suggest the new one in the middle of the QuickType bar.

Tap the option in quote marks to keep what you've typed. If you realise it's corrected a word after typing, just tap backspace to delete into the word and retype – autocorrect won't kick in again unless you drastically change the word.

When you fix autocorrect's changes, the dictionary learns your new words, so it won't bug you for corrections next time. You can turn autocorrect off in Settings > General > Keyboard; and if you feel you'd be better off starting over with the system afresh, you can simply reset your autocorrect dictionary in Settings > General > Reset > Reset Keyboard Dictionary.

1. Teach TextExpander

There's a great but little-used feature in iOS called TextExpander, which enables you to set 'shortcuts' for longer messages – Apple's example is that you can just type 'omw' and it autocorrects to 'On my way'.

This system ties into the general autocorrect system, so we can use it to make some cunning tweaks. To begin, tap Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts.

2. Specific replacements

If you've accidentally made autocorrect learn a common mistake that it should be correcting (such as 'youre'), you can fix it with TextExpander. Tap the + sign (top right), and in the Phrase field, enter the correct word.

In the Shortcut field, type in the one that you got wrong before. Tap Save, and now when you write the latter, it changes to the former.

3. Manually add words

If you want to add words to autocorrect's library in advance, use TextExpander. Add a new shortcut, and type the word you want into the Phrase field, with capitalisation as you want it.

Don't put anything in the Shortcut field. Save this, and the word is effectively added to your autocorrect dictionary. To remove an entry in the shortcuts list, swipe it to the left and tap Delete.

• Enjoyed this article? Get more tutorials, guides, and tips on how to get the most from your Apple devices inside MacFormat. Take advantage of an exclusive offer in our sampler today.

http://www.techradar.com/how-to/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/how-to-improve-autocorrect-on-iphone-and-ipad-1315227?src=rss&attr=all

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Use a Raspberry Pi to remotely watch your home

TechRadar: All latest feeds Use a Raspberry Pi to remotely watch your home

For this Raspberry Pi project we'll create a remote monitor for tracking activity in a home. Before we begin, make sure that your webcam is plugged into your Raspberry Pi. To update our system and install the webcam motion software, you'll need to open XTerminal and type:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install motion

With motion installed let's configure it with:

$ sudo nano /etc/default/motion

You'll see start_motion_daemon=no change this to yes.

Now press Ctrl+o to save and Ctrl+x to quit. Now we need to make a few changes to our motion.conf file. Open it with $ sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf . Ensure the following is correct before saving (Ctrl+o) and exiting (CtrlL+x) nano

daemon on

width 640

height 480

framerate 100

stream_localhost off

Reboot your Raspberry Pi before continuing. Now let's test our stream. In a terminal type $ sudo service motion start .

Now in a browser on another machine type in the IP address of your Raspberry Pi, you can find this in the terminal by typing hostname -I followed by :8081 so for example my IP address was 192.168.0.3:8081.

You should now see a video stream in your browser. Now that we have the stream working let's embed it into a live web page. To do this we will need to install Apache. In a terminal type $ sudo apt-get install apache2 -y . This will also create a new directory in /var/ called /www/ which we shall use to serve our pages.

Open the text editor on your Raspberry Pi. We will now write a few lines of HTML to build a simple web page.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<title>Puppy/Baby Monitor</title>

<body>

<xmp theme="cyborg">

## I wonder what the dog/baby is up to?

<img

src="http://192.168.0.3:8081/">

</xmp>

</body>

<script src="http://strapdownjs.com/v/0.2/strapdown.js"></

script>

</html>

We start by declaring the document as a valid HTML document and give the page a title to identify it in our browser. Now we move to the <body> where we use a framework called strapdown, which mixes markdown – a popular writing format – with Twitter's bootstrap framework.

In essence we can make a nice page rather quickly. We're using the cyborg style as it's dark and looks great on devices. To create a headline we use two hashes (#) and then type the contents of the headline. Next, we add an image whose source is the IP address of the webcam stream.

To make sure the IP address matches that of your Pi we add :8081 at the end. We then instruct the browser to load a JavaScript file containing the strapdown functionality. Save your file as index.html to your home directory. Open a terminal and type the following to copy the file to our web server:

$ sudo cp /home/pi/index.html /var/www/html/

Finally, we need to start our web server and restart the motion service.

$ sudo service apache2 start

$ sudo service motion restart

Now visit your Raspberry Pi's IP address – you no longer need to add :8081 to the end of the IP) – and you will now see a video stream from your Raspberry Pi.

CCTV

The Raspberry Pi has made many different types of projects possible and one that's popular is CCTV. The official Raspberry Pi Camera, along with the Pi offer a low cost, high quality and low-power project you can build quickly.

In this project, we used motion to stream our webcam to a webpage, but motion can be used to search for motion and stream as well, eg we can record a video stream to a local or cloud device which will be triggered by a burglar, baby or Jack Russell terrier.

Add a Passive Infra Red (PIR) sensor to this code, such as the one used in our delivery watch project, and you have a powerful application that can alert you to incidents and record the evidence. Another great application to use with a webcam is Zoneminder which also works with the Raspberry Pi.

Using Zoneminder, you'll be able to monitor multiple streams and set up zones which will trigger an alert, eg a zone drawn around a door frame would trigger if a person used the door, but the surrounding area wouldn't be monitored for activity.

• Check out our collection of fantastic Raspberry Pi projects

http://www.techradar.com/us/how-to/computing/use-a-raspberry-pi-to-remotely-watch-your-home-1314466?src=rss&attr=all

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