Mercedes star xentry North west for cruise control

[Mugwump]

My nearest Mercedes dealer was Road Range in Birkdale.
It's difficult to get past the sales drone on the door, all he was interested in was to book the car in for an unspecified time and an inevitably hefty bill.

Once I did get past him to one of the tech staff, it was revealed that they had never heard of it, and wouldn't have a clue how to do it.
Last thing I need is somebody who doesn't know what they're doing messing with my car and costing me a fortune-per-hour in the process!

 

[Mugwump]

After a lot of agonising about trying to find a pukka solution, I bought a C3 mux from ebay, along with an SSD with the software required pre-installed.

It took a LOT of trial and error to get it working.
I went through 6x PCs (and a loft clearout) before I found one that would actually boot the drive successfully.

The main problem being that the SSD was a 32-bit XP installation (max 4Gb ram) and the C3 needs a serial port.
I had a load of those in the loft, but they were all old and unreliable (and now scrapped).
Also, any with AGP graphics would lock up as soon as it tried to switch into the windows interface.

Once I finally found a PC that booted, the next problem was getting comms to the C3.
The motherboard had the serial port, but the BIOS would only allow it to be set to COM1 or COM3. The software requires COM2.
I had thought that since the C3 uses an inline RS232-RS485 converter it wouldn't work with a USB serial port, but after a lot of messing about I disabled the onboard serial port and tried it - the USB one worked perfectly.
So no, you don't actually need a hardware serial port as long as you have USB.

The next problem was software - Vediamo seemed to be the best way to go, but I couldn't get a valid hardware ID out of my C3 so couldn't activate it.

So finally decided to have a go using XEntry.


Result : as of this morning, I now have working cruise control and speed limiter.
Cruise control is lovely!

The speed limiter is a bit weird to use though.
The kickdown over-ride doesn't seem to be operating, and I haven't yet figured out how to definitively set it to limit at current speed (it goes up/down 5mph fine).
And I don't know when the LIM light is supposed to come on in the cluster - mine hasn't lit once.
I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Right now, I'm a happy bunny.

 

[windsurfer]

Hi @Mugwump,
Do you mind sharing more on what Xentry version you have used and the process to get CC activated?
I've retrofitted the stalk on my W639 Viano too. would like to activate it too before i try MB dealer. Going away on 7K roadtrip in few weeks.

I'm using Xentry passthru 03.2022 version and Tactrix Openport 2.0 (Chinese stuff).

Can't see the submenu for cruise under ESP -> Actuations, as per Scott Elliotts utube guide on the install. Scott was using pretty old DAS version, I can't get hold of anything that old now.


BTW: regards your issue on the speed limiter - i'm guessing you have not replaced accelerator pedal for kick down? Someone mentioned similar on another group i've seen. Eg if you didn't replace accel. pedal for the limiter kickdown won't work. Not sure if true yet ..

 

[Mugwump]

Hi @Mugwump,
Do you mind sharing more on what Xentry version you have used and the process to get CC activated?
I've retrofitted the stalk on my W639 Viano too. would like to activate it too before i try MB dealer. Going away on 7K roadtrip in few weeks.

I'm using Xentry passthru 03.2022 version and Tactrix Openport 2.0 (Chinese stuff).

Can't see the submenu for cruise under ESP -> Actuations, as per Scott Elliotts utube guide on the install. Scott was using pretty old DAS version, I can't get hold of anything that old now.


BTW: regards your issue on the speed limiter - i'm guessing you have not replaced accelerator pedal for kick down? Someone mentioned similar on another group i've seen. Eg if you didn't replace accel. pedal for the limiter kickdown won't work. Not sure if true yet ..

The PC is all packed away in storage, but from memory it was a late-ish edition, supposedly one of the last versions to be able to run standalone.
It came as part of a bundle on AliExpress - I had my doubts about it, but it ran OK once I found a suitable PC (and scrapped a lot of others).

The overall process was easier than a lot of people make out. Again, I'm working from memory here, but overall it went something like:

1. Run the Instrument Cluster Lights check to ensure that my cluster had the LIM light present.
   Probably not necessary, but I did it anyway.
   
   
2. Enable Variant Coding and obtain the current string - saved in a text file for safety if required.
   I think there was something that I found mentioned somewhere, some condition required before you could go into Variant Coding.
   I made a copy of the existing codes before changing anything.
   
   
3. Look for Tempomat in the right module and enable it.
   You'll notice that I've changed the Klima**** setting to Klima*Tempomat****. That was the main change.

Sorry I can't remember much more detail than that. It WAS a year ago.
If it's any use, I did take a few before/after photos - see attachments?
Does the 07/2015 in the top corner indicate the XENTRY version?

Oh, and no, I didn't replace the pedal. I'm not too worried about the kickdown, in some ways it's quite nice to be able to drive with your foot on the floor....



Got bigger fish to worry about now.
Car back in garage to have its THIRD round of black death fixed, and I'm starting to think my "Diesel Injection Specialist" isn't up to much.
At least this fix should be under warranty, he's charged them all within the last year or so, so there's nobody else he can blame....

And the aircon has stopped blowing cold, despite a re-gas....

 

[windsurfer]

@Mugwump thank you so much for this. I was offline for some time as travelling at the moment (without a cruise control). I'll have a play once i get a chance.

I hope you sorted your current issues. Last year I've just noticed aircon is not working when we were already in France, tried to re-gas but there was a hole in the condenser. Done some 8k+ miles without the aircon and sometimes it was 38 degrees on the road. No fun at all.