mcurbo

I am upgrading my base mirror to one with homelink, autodim, compass, maplights, and temp. The new mirror has a 10 pin connector and my original 2007 C6 vert mirror has 16 pins. I want to splice the existing wiring to the new 10 pin harness, and after searching most of the morning I know where the 12V switched and ground are, but I would like to know what the other wires are for. I have the pinouts for the new mirror, so all I need is the wiring for the C6. Any help would be much appreciated.
Mike

mcurbo

Well I figured out the wires, and got the new mirror put in with a minimum amount of cussing, dog beating, or left-over parts. In my mind this makes it a success. Just some background for you, I just got rid of my Porsche, and out of the blue bought a 2007 convertible base model corvette. I have never even sat in one, much less owned one. The car seems to be in great shape, but it was obviously a bare bones car when it was purchased. I like a lot of bells and whistles, and one of the first things that jumped out at me is the car did not have homelink or an auto dimming rearview mirror. Being the refined redneck that I am, this was unacceptable and therfore has become my first DIY project on the vette. I purchased a 2002-2005 Sebring mirror on ebay that came with the original wiring harness and the ambient temperature sensor for $78. It has auto-dim, homelink, compass, and temp. Obviously I do not need all of this, but since it was there, I thought why not. I got the wiring diagram for the new mirror off the internet, but I couldn’t find anything on my mirror’s wiring except for the 12V and the ground. I have been gathering a lot of information from this forum that I will being using in the near future, so I thought I would give back to the community by detailing this project for anyone that might be interested.

Being the base model mirror, I had a 16-pin connector that was actually using 6 of the slots. Here is the slot number, color, and function of those wires:
1 tan = interior/map light (12V that switches off when door is open)
3 tan/black = passenger airbag on
4 red = passenger airbag off
6 orange = 12V constant
8 black = ground
13 pink = 12V ignition

The new mirror used a 10-pin connector, and here is the wiring layout:
1 red/white = 12V constant
3 black = ground
4 yellow = ambient temperature sensor
5 violet/white = ambient temperature sensor
8 green/orange = interior/map light (ground trigger)
9 red/blue = reverse light
10 blue/red = 12V ignition

Here are the two connectors:





Like I said earlier, I have basically no use for another outside temperature display, but the mirror is going to say OC under the compass if it does not get a signal. Plus, you know as well as I do that it will never agree with the existing outside temp inside the car and my OCD is going to kick into overdrive when that happens. Regardless, I decided that since the mirror had it, I was going to install it and do the best job possible. I found a nice spot to mount it in the front grill about 8 inches right of the factory sensor. It is hard to explain, but the one that came with my mirror has a little lip that almost acts as a clip. I found a spot where two pieces of metal joined and left a raised area where I could slide the “clip” in between. I secured it with a little Loctite sealer/bond and used some ¼” plastic split loom wire wrap to protect the wiring, and to make it appear like I really knew what I was doing. This picture is literally laying in front of the car looking into the grill at the radiator, but maybe you can see how I slid the clippy thing onto the metal:




I put a flashlight into the grill area, and then stood up top on the passenger side of the car until I could see a spot where light shown through. There is a pretty nice spot between the radiator and the tire well that was surprisingly easy to do what I needed. I doubt this picture shows much, but like the ambient temperature on a mirror, I took the picture so why not use it. The plastic wire protector coming in from the bottom of the screen is mine, and if you look closely you can see a blue clip in the distance that is actually the factory temperature probe, and the yellow paint from inside the front grill area:




Pretty simple from here. There wire comes up just under the passenger side hood strut, and I secured it pretty regularly to anything I could find all the way back to the battery:




Remove the battery, and you can see a big wire bundle going through the firewall. I tried to fish a wire through the grommet, but to be honest I felt like my coat hanger might do more harm than good, so I chose to go on the outside of the grommet and use some silicone to seal the small gap created. Once inside the cabin, I pulled back the passenger floorboard and removed the trim piece above the foot-well (just below the glovebox) that houses the interior light. This reveals the grommet very nicely as well as the fuse box, BCM, and empty spot where the Bose amplifier would go. The mirror uses a signal from the reverse lights to tell the mirror not to auto-dim when backing up. Would not matter a rat’s a$$ if you chose not to use this, but again, I consider myself a refined redneck and I want to say I hooked it up so when my neighbor googles something about my mirror and just assumes I would skip that step, and can shake my head in disbelief in the lack of faith he has in me. If you look at this picture, you can see the grommet in the upper right-hand corner with my purple marine-grade speaker wire coming down the right side of the picture. The BCM is just above the fuse box. There is essentially three large wire bundles entering (leaving?) the BCM. You do not care about the two fancy ones with the grey connector and blue locking lever. We need the green wire from the bundle entering the block just above the fuse box. You can see where I tapped into the wire here:




Now I have a pair of wires from my ambient temp sensor, the reverse light wire, and as I noted earlier everything else is already at the mirror. Getting the wires to the top of the windshield was very easy.




From this point, I popped the trim loose from the a-pillar and then ran the wire up to the top. I decided to go ahead and remove the entire top trim piece. In hindsight I believe there is more than enough slack to just pull the front lip back enough to tuck the wiring back behind it, but I was still uneasy about the project, so I decided to remove it. Removing the sun visors was absolutely no fun. Maybe now that I know how they work I could do it better, but basically it sucked! Putting them back on was no better, but until one flies off when I have the top down, I believe I took them off and put them back on without screwing anything up! With that said, it sure was nice to have full access to all the wiring. I could splice wires until my heart was content now that I could actually see and manipulate everything. Everything from here was straightforward. I matched up the wires I had with what the new mirror needed, and then put everything back together.

Now the new mirror has a mounting system that basically 98% of the world uses and for decades has been more than reliable. The engineers of the corvette thought it would be fun to change this setup and use a mounting system that an 8 year-old autistic kid designed one afternoon while in time-out after severely burning the family cat in a failed time machine experiment. The good news is I get to use a butane torch to remove this piece of crap! I got myself a beer, a torch, and a very wet towel and proceeded to heat the old button/wedge on the windshield until it started popping, sparking, and turning red. Much to my satisfaction, it promptly fell off the windshield where I caught it in my very wet towel. Just take a second to think what would have happened if this red-hot piece of metal had come off with no way to safely catch it…

I glued the new (more traditional) wedge in place and then hung the mirror. It has been two days and everything is working great. I had one hiccup when I tried to mount the mirror, one of the temp sensor wired came loose (poor splice job on my part). The mirror was showing a fairly accurate temp up to that point, but after that it kept wanting to read -40. I went to bed, and the next day it never missed a beat. I guess having it connected, and then just having one wire connected threw it for a loop. Regardless it has been working ever since and I honestly did nothing to it but cuss, drink beer, and went to bed (maybe not in that order). I took a picture of the final product, but there was a nasty glare and chose not to use it. Feel free to ask any questions if there is something I overlooked.

Mike

4SUMERZ

Great DIY The wiring diagram might come in handy for someone else.

Reggied

bump

TahoeJohnny

I could have figured it out on my own, but you saved me a bunch of time trying to work with these teeny tiny holes. Thank you so much for that wiring diagram!

madsonp

I know you figured it out already but I thought I'd post this.