History has a way of repeating itself, and this was the case here. For the second time, I set off on a crusade in emerald green. This time, the task was more challenging. In addition to replacing the light bulbs, I also wanted to upgrade the backlighting of the driver’s door control panel. It bothered me that only the LOCK and AUTO buttons were illuminated. It turned out that the board had connectors for the other LEDs as well, so I soldered the missing resistor and three LEDs. Since they differed in color from the original ones, I decided to replace those two as well:

Final effect:

The cool thing about that board is that when passengers’ controls are disabled it also cuts off their backlighting:

As a fun fact, the board can be used plug-and-play with Forester SG.

Next in line, and just like with the Forester, was the Bluetooth module; this was definitely a more difficult task. The Impreza has a standard Kenwood GX-401EF2 radio, but unfortunately, the Bluetooth module from the Chinese manufacturer (similar to the one in the Forester, but with the correct connector) didn’t work. There are legends about a resistor on a pin, but nothing came of it. The next option was the dedicated Kenwood KCA-BT100, which fortunately was for sale in Poznań, so I could test it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work with the radio either. While it connected fine and the radio recognized it as a CD changer emulator, it wasn’t possible to control the module from the radio or connect a phone to it. I suspect this particular unit already had a full list of known devices and rejected any new connections.

I found myself in a bit of desperation. I want to keep the Impreza as close to stock as possible, so a modern radio was out of the question. On the other hand, the amount of ads on the airwaves is unbearable, and the only non virtual music I buy these days won’t even fit in the player — round they are, but way too big, and need 33 1⁄3 rpm.

Then, the user manual came to the rescue. While I was looking for how to activate the maximum/cut-off rev buzzer (what a cool feature that is, I should write a post about it), I noticed that there was an option for a 6-CD changer radio, the same as in the post-facelift Forester SGs, the GX-806EF2, which works with the Wefa CD changer emulator. I got WF603, which pretty great.

And at the very end, Gerda the dog is once again predicting the future:

• Impreza
• Gd
• Sti
• Car Audio