After the mirror the next item on my list was to get my tablet up and running again. The tablet was an essential item for me, and provided both multimedia and navigation on road trips. I had used it in my 3rd for a number of years, although the previous installation used a
long arm flexible mount that bolted to the passenger seat rail. It worked, but there was a fair amount of movement and my wife (and I'm sure other passengers) was less pleased about the device intruding into the passenger's area.
For this vehicle I was determined to do things a little bit better. After looking around the front of the vehicle I realized there was a fair amount of free space on the right side of the center control stack. I looked at a mount that attached to the stereo bolt points, but rejected it due to reported interference with the glove box. I ultimately settled upon RAM and its cornucopia of mounts and options. Taking the dash apart proved to be simple... start at the center console and start lifting pieces up and out, unscrew a few bolts under the dash and the surround comes right out!
I used a two-screw
RAM ball as the base. I believe these are typically used at the device end, but I needed the room and the
standard 1" ball mount was too big. I reinforced behind the ball with a steel plate to give the plastic some extra rigidity. The
RAM tablet mount proved to be the perfect fit for my Samsung Tab S 8.4.
I also knew that the tablet would require power, and I also wanted to provide power for my wife or guests to charge their devices. There are a number of cheap options on Amazon, but I wanted quality and high-amp output so I chose a
Bluesea Dual USB charger with a solid output rating. Mounting was a snap, although I did have to go to Home Depot to purchase a 1 1/8" hole bit to accomplish the task. I also had to mount the outlet a little off-center to avoid compromising the reinforcements along the outer side of the plastic surround. From there it was a simple matter to run pair of wires over to the inside fuse box, tap an unused location with an Add-a-Circuit, and tie the black wire to ground. I located both constant-on and ignition-on circuits, but opted for the constant-on to allow device charging while the vehicle is off. The BlueSea unit specs say it will only consume about 15mA in standby, so that's not likely to run down the battery very quickly.
I had initially planned a similar placement to my 3rd gen... down and to the right. I also wanted to make sure that the tablet did not interfere with operation of the stereo. This proved to be completely unnecessary as once I set the stereo to the AUX input I found I never needed to use the head unit itself... I never switched away from AUX, and volume control and mode changes could be easily made from the steering wheel. Thus I moved the tablet upward to a more central and useful location, with the arm essentially back up against the dash.
Having loose but necessary cables in the front cabin proved to be annoying, especially given the location of the AUX input at the bottom of the center console storage box. Additionally, with both auxiliary input AND power connected at the same time I was running into an interference issue playing audio on the head unit. Once again I took the console and dash control stack apart, and after adding a
ground loop noise isolator rerouted the AUX input back to a short cable that comes out under the stereo and connects to the tablet. I procured right angle cables for both audio and USB power, and was lucky enough to find a
double right-angled wound USB power cord to nicely clean up the installation, as shown above.
Once installed and in use I wanted to improve ease of operation. Playing my own music through the tablet and streaming if I wanted was great, but the steering wheel controls could only control the volume, and not the play/pause/skip functions. I found a tiny
Bluetooth media remote on Amazon, but honestly while it did the job the little sleeve that clipped it to the steering wheel made it obnoxious and in the way. After thinking about this for a few days and wanting to just throw it out of the window I came up with a solution.
I took snipped the little wings off of the clip that housed the remote and ground the sleeve flat on the bottom. Similarly I pulled one of the button covers and also ground the top of it flat... if you want to try this be aware there is very little material on top and you can start to grind through the cover trying to get a flat surface. A little glue and I now had an easily accessible media controller! I also knew I planned to add lights in the future, and was able to find a Limited mid-console plate super cheap on eBay which gave me two extra future button locations and allowed me to move the seldom-used DAC control out of the way. The remote is intentionally mounted slightly off-center on the button cover to allow easy use of future controls placed next to it.
The tablet is now an essential part of the vehicle. Much of the time I use the display to run
Torque and show extra gauges. Torque connects to the vehicle using a
cheap Bluetooth ODBII adapter and can output all sorts of current information on the vehicle, including fuel consumption and both engine and transmission temps. The larger tires on the vehicle make the built-in speedo quite inaccurate, so running a GPS speed gauge helps make sure I don't inadvertently get a ticket. At some point I will buy the unit to adjust the real speedo, but for now this was a cheap fix and I wanted Torque anyway for the other information it provided.
In addition to the gauges the tablet provides a whole host of other functions. It's the international Tab S so it has both phone and text capabilities. It can provide navigation when needed, although I usually use my actual phone for that task. It also has enough horsepower to play movies and a few videogames in the downtimes on those long road trips. Thankfully it's also easy to remove and take with me...
. Cheers