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Audiovox CCS-100 cruise control on an FJR1300

In August, 2006 I installed an Audiovox CCS-100 cruise control in my 04 ABS. I used a bunch of great info from Arlen Bloom's instructions at fjr1300.info and other bits and pieces that I'd printed out and saved for this day. Anybody contemplating this farkle should absolutely get, print, read, and understand those instructions.

But there's one thing I wish I'd gotten from the net - it would have saved me a little trouble. It turns out there are two key diagnostic features of the LED inside the CCS-100 device. Below is what I found out about it, and some other information I can share about this installation.

Also, there is a much simpler wiring solution available, if you're willing to give up a few things - like the backlights on the control pad and the On/Off buttons. See below for that, too.

The diagnostic LED

There is an LED inside the main CCS-100 unit housing next to the set of jumpers. (On my unit the LED is red.) It has two key diagnostic features.

First, you can use it to tell if your buttons are working - that is, the On, Off, Set, and Resume buttons on the control pad. Once you turn on your bike and press the "On" button on the cruise control switch pad, the main unit is energized. Now press the Set button and watch the LED inside the main unit. If it turns on and then off, your Set button is working. Do the same for the Resume button. Then press the Off button and try the others - they should not cause the LED to light, because the whole unit is now off.

Second - and this is the big one - you can tell if your signal from the ignition coil / tachometer tap is working. Start the bike, press the "On" button to enable cruise, and watch the LED. It should be flashing on and off at a steady pace - mine was about once a second or so. If it's not on at all (when not pressing any control pad buttons) then your engine-speed pickup isn't working. The LED should flash at a rate proportional to the engine speed: rev the engine and you'll see the light blink faster. If it does, you have a good connection to your tach, coil, or whatever you're using for the engine speed.

The gray control-pad wire

Here's another item that's missing from Arlen Bloom's original 2003 instructions: the black wire from the switch housing goes to ground, and the gray wire should go to switched power. Any switched power will do - you don't have to run it to your turn signals / running lights. The gray wire controls the backlight LEDs inside the switch housing, and the manual says to connect that wire to your running lights on the theory that they come on with your headlights - that is, only at night. But on a motorcycle there's no difference between the running lights and any other switched power.

Much simpler wiring

I encourage anybody considering this accessory to read this section. It will make the wiring job much simpler. If you're willing to live without the on/off button on the control pad, and also the lights that illuminate its buttons and give you the on/off status, there is much less wiring to do.

With this change you can run just three wires from the main unit to the front of the bike, and those wires go straight to the switch pod - you won't have any wires running off under your side panels to find ground, switched power, the tach signal, or your running lights. This information came from Jeff Delzer (dbx on fjrforum), who says he in turn was inspired by BrunDog. I puzzled out some of the whys and wherefores and I'm convinced it's safe and effective.

There are three key bits of information that make this possible. Item One is that the main unit gets its operating power either from the red wire that you connect to the brake signal, or from the brown wire returning from the front. If you connect red and brown together near the unit, you are giving it power and also its "On" signal without needing power from the front. Item Two is that once you've connected red and brown at the unit, the only purpose of the red, gray, and black wires at the front of the bike is to power the control pad's backlights and status light. If you can do without those lights you don't need the wires. Item Three is that you can get the tach signal from the main ECU connector under the tool tray instead of getting it from the coil at the front of the bike.

Are you still with me? Here are the revised wiring instructions:

1. Connect the red and purple wires from the main unit to the brown and yellow wires, respectively, of the brown plug under the right side cover. This provides unit's power on the red wire and the brake signal on the purple. (See below for an alternative location to get these.)
2. Connect the black wire from the main unit to a frame ground under the seat.
3. Cut off and discard the insulated combined gray-and-black signal wires - you won't be needing those.
4. Connect the blue tachometer signal wire from the main unit to the orange wire that goes into the ECU - that is, the Engine Control Unit, the engine's computer. To access this connector you remove the left side panel and also the cover you find underneath it. Then you'll see a wide connector with two rows of 22 wires that plugs in to a device that's sitting under the tool tray. The orange wire is at the top left of that connector. (In the original instructions, the blue wire from the unit goes to the gray wire on the coil under the right front panel. That is an ignition signal for the two right cylinders; the orange wire is the same signal for the left cylinders.) Don't cut the blue wire off short - there is a red tag on the blue wire marking the location of a "noise reduction" diode that you want to leave in place.
5. Splice the red and brown wires from the unit together, so they are connected to each other. Don't cut either one - the red wire still has to go from the main unit to the brake connector, and the brown wire still has to run from the main unit to the front of the bike.

What's left coming out of the main unit are the brown, yellow, and green wires. These will run to the front of the bike. The instructions tell you to find the four-pin white plastic connector in the kit, the one with one red wire already sticking out of it. That red wire runs to a fuse, and then an orange wire comes out again. You don't need the red wire, the fuse, or the orange wire. You can cut them off the connector. Then plug the brown, green, and yellow wire ends in to the connector like the instructions say.

Find the control pad. If you're going to use the control pad at all (see below for the alternatives), here is what to do with each wire coming out of it:

• Black wire: cut and discard.
• Gray wire: cut and discard.
• Red wire: cut and discard.
• Green, yellow, and brown wires: let these run to the other white plastic connector so they mate with the same colored wires going back to the main unit.

There, isn't that easy? The original instructions want you to run the black to ground, the gray to your turn signals/running lights, and the red to switched power. Sheesh! All that trouble, just so the control pad will light up. You only have to use it for a day or two before you'll know where the buttons are in the dark anyway. (The original idea of having signals both from switched power and the running lights is so the pad's backlights only come on at night, when the headlights are on. On a bike they're always on so this is redundant anyway.)

Here is a kind of ASCII sketch of the final wiring diagram. (I'll probably draw it for-real one day...)

----+--- brown brake wire      yellow brake wire --+---           /==========
    |                                              |              :
    |                                              \-----purple-----
    |     (optional 3A fuse here)                                 :   M   U
    \-----[F*]------------------------------red---------+-----------  a   n
                                                        |         :   i   i
                  connect brown and red together---->   |         :   n   t
                                                        |         :
 <<---to-front-of-bike----------------------brown-------+-----------
 <<---to-front-of-bike----------------------yellow------------------
 <<---to-front-of-bike----------------------green-------------------
                              ground -------black-------------------
    /---------------------------------------blue--------------------
    |                                                             :
    |                                                             \==========
----+----- orange wire at ECU connector

Even better: according to TwistyRoad at www.fjrowners.ws in this thread, there are accessible wires on the left side of the bike - the ECU side, where the blue wire is heading anyway - where you can get the switched power and switched ground you need for the unit's red and purple wires. I don't know the colors to use on that side, but the result is that blue, red, and purple from the cruise control all run to one place (the ECU connector), and brown, yellow, and green run to the front.

You don't have to use the supplied control pad - after all, you've disabled half of it and it doesn't light up any more. Jeff used a SPDT normally-open toggle switch instead. See his notes and pictures in this thread: http://www.fjrforum.com/forum//index.php?showtopic=11194&st=20 (look for the post by dbx). Wire the switch so brown and yellow connect for "Resume," and brown and green connect for "Set." Jeff said he wasn't sure he had to connect brown and red back at the main unit; I checked and I'm sure you do have to do that.

The result of this change is that the cruise control is "On" all the time - always ready for you to press Set or Resume to engage it. You lose the "Off" switch, but using either brake or the clutch will still disengage it.

Now, why does this work? Here's what I've figured out. The main unit uses the brown wire for two things: one, it puts 11V on it as a signal voltage, so it can sense when you press the buttons that connect it to the green or yellow wires. The other job of the brown wire is to listen for the control pad's "On/Off" signal. The control pad puts the full 12V from its red wire on the brown wire when you press the "On" button, and takes it away when you press "Off." By shorting the brown wire to red (12V) at the unit, you're telling it to be "always on." The rest works like it ever did: brown-to-green means "Set" and brown-to-yellow means "Resume." The other wires were needed for the control pad's backlights and ground, which you're not using any more.

(I might have some of this wrong. What I know for sure is that I measured 11V on the unit's brown wire after I disconnected the control pad power and ground, and before I shorted the unit's red and brown wires together. Even though it was getting 12V through its red wire, the unit didn't consider itself in "On" mode until I connected red and brown.)

Safety tip: with this modified wiring, the unit is getting all its power from the power side of the brake light circuit. I've checked the wiring diagram and the bike's brown wire at the brown connector comes straight from the battery through the main fuse, the main switch, and the signaling system fuse. This circuit can handle the additional load of the cruise control, but this does mean the unit is not protected by a 3A fuse any more. If it ever was: maybe the main unit has always been taking its power from the 12V side of the brake circuit, in which case nothing has changed. But if it took its main power from the pad-controlled brown wire, well, now it's getting 12V right off the top, with no fuse. You could put the 3A fuse in line with the red wire, at the location marked [F*] in the diagram above.

Other info

Finally, here are some of the key notes and items beyond what's in Arlen's original writeup:

• Arlen did his install on a non-ABS bike. On ABS bikes you can't use the space under the right side cover - it's full of the ABS hydraulic controller. I found I could use my tool tray by cutting out a channel for the cable to exit through, and as a bonus the seat itself secures the unit in place. People have put an auxiliary vacuum reservoir next to it, but I don't know if I need one yet.
• I tried to remove my fuel rail but failed - I couldn't break the securing bolts free. Instead I stripped one of the Phillips heads - I hope my dealer can get that bolt out and replace it with a good one. It would have made things a lot easier, maybe I could find the right size Phillips head driver and get a clean angle on it next time.
• Drilling a hole in the "tang" is the hardest part. Get a carbide or titanium drill bit; my other bits just made a dent without drilling through.
• Instead of putting a nut and bolt through the hole you drilled in the tang, use the cotter pin that comes in the hardware kit. See this forum message on fjrowners.ws for details. There is more good info in this other thread, in the post by "Saluda" especially.
• The proper wire to tap on the coil is the gray one, not the red-and-gray one. (But see above for how to get the signal for the blue wire without running it to the front.)

In general, this is a good project if you're handy (and a nightmare if you're not), and you should Google the hell out of "FJR1300" and "Audiovox" to get all the information, hints, tips, and alternatives you can.