STATUS: Completed
Completion Date: 12/28/23

Nissan Radio Upgrade Conversion

Many 2017 Rogue owners, including my parents, were very frustrated with the outdated stock infotainment system in the car. Due to the custom fitted nature and many CAN controlled peripherals on the car, it wasn’t as easy as putting a standard DIN radio in the car.

Before my conversion, a few options were available:

  • 3rd party Android radio. From experience these are buggy and littered with compatibility issues

  • 3rd party Double DIN. This would require a faceplate adapter, look unsightly, and require expensive adapters to get the OEM functionality back

  • External Android Auto adapter, which has issues with audio sync and steering wheel controls, along with taking up valuable dashboard space.

Being unwilling to accept these poor options, I decided to attempt the “impossible”: put the OEM 2018 radio in the 2017 car.

Feasibility study

Figuring out if this was even possible was quite laborious. From initial research, people had found out Nissan changed the connectors on the back of the radio quite significantly between the 2017 and 2018. This knowledge turned off many people from seeing if they were actually compatible.

After looking over the layout of the radios online, I found the following changes were made electrically:

  • 20+24 pin main connections were changed to a 20+40. The two 20 pins had different pinouts

  • 8 pin connectors had been dropped on the 2018

So far, didn’t seem too unrealistic to adapt.

Reverse engineering the pinout matrix

Thanks to the local library, Factory service manuals were provided for both vehicles. From here it was easy enough to get the pinouts for all the radios connectors and see how things would be wired up.

I found that for the most part, pins were moved around. However, I still was stuck with these unknowns:

  • 2017

    • SPEED SIGNAL

    • CAN-H/L

    • MR OUTPUT

    • HE/VR MODE CHG

  • 2018

    • V-CAN H/L

    • PKB

For the above, it would seem PKB is a parking brake, unimportant for the 2017 and US made 2018’s. The MR OUTPUT and HE/VR MODE CHG is a vestigial signal from the older style microphone unit. The two different CAN busses may prove to be a challenge later.

Where to find the right radio?

Well, Nissan made ~400,000 Rogues in just 2018. To retain compatibility, I needed to find the somewhat uncommon SL trim radio. However, due to most radios being loose on 2nd hand shops, and VIN numbers hard to reverse-lookup, I would need to find a creative method of ID’ing these radios.

Somewhat naively, I bought a radio thinking there was only two models: non-Nav and Navigation equipped. This was easy to determine on the back, since only Nav units had the 2nd blue antenna port for the GPS receiver.

However upon receiving this radio, I had a bigger issue to resolve than compatibility….

CAN-enabled or dead radio?

Upon receiving the radio, I attempted to power it up using a benchtop power supply. From previous experience on older Ford radios, +12v to BAT & IGN signal will get it to boot. However, it was doing nothing for me.

I knew a few things:

  • It would draw ~900mA for about a min, then drop to idle

  • The CD drive would work and eject, and seem to attempt to play

  • Pressing eject would wake up the power for ~5 seconds.

However besides that, it appeared dead. I probed the V-CAN and M-CAN bus to see if I could see anything, and there was activity. I figured some newer radios have CAN locks, and this is true on European X-trails (same car, different name in Europe). On certain makes, especially Uconnect4 on CJDR based makes, without a valid VIN the radio will appear dead. Nissan radios are not like this, they will boot to an error code. Also from all my research, US-make Rogue radios are NOT VIN-locked.

Further research shows bench-tested radios on eBay with only +12V and GND, showing that these radios can boot without CAN connected. Sadly, this radio was just dead on arrival.

Part 2: the big radio hunt

After the disaster with the first radio, I was determined to find the right radio. I wanted to find one out of an SL-trim car AND see it tested working. However, this proved to be quite difficult.

I had found a much easier method of sorting through radios though.

  • The Nav radios on one of the face buttons say “MAP” instead of an icon of a phone.

  • Many junkyards have eBay shops showing the car they came out of instead of the radio. These listings don’t look right at first, however proved to be quite useful

After an extensive hunt through every 18-20 Rogue radio on eBay, about 450 radios were found. 66 of them were Navigation equipped, another 10 were proven to be about of an SL-trim car, and of that 3 of them were shown with the car booted and the radio confirmed working.

As a bonus: the radio was half the price of the original one I ordered.

Harness connector madness

Its not exactly easy to create a 3 foot tall 3D print, none the less one capable of being sturdy enough to retain a 14lb LCD panel, and stand up to the tough environment of a trade show.

Gluing parts together can be tedious and hard to align. My solution uses steel pins between every piece to keep everything inline during gluing. This has a secondary effect of preventing twisting of the joints, in which superglue is not as strong.

Inside the case, fitted “modules” allowed for easy and quick mounting and serviceability of the individual components such as the Mac Mini and power supply units.