I bought my car used, and never gave any thought to its keyless entry system until my only remote stopped working, and I couldn’t seem to program the car to accept a new Toyota remote. It turns out my remote — a DEI 476T — wasn’t some sort of universal replacement transmitter, but implied that an aftermarket alarm system was installed. And under my dash I easily found a Directed Electronics Inc. Sidewinder 3000ESP. Not connected to a siren, mind you, and too easily disconnected to qualify as a security system. But an acceptable keyless entry system, with the bonus of qualifying me for an insurance discount.

(When I first bought the car I took it to a local tire shop for the insurance inspection, and after getting only confused responses from me about the security system, the mechanic took one look at my key fob and put me down for the discount. I thought he was being too generous until this week. Now I’m just amused I qualify for it with an alarm system that might blink the lights a lot in an emergency.)

Anyway, because this alarm system was so half-assedly installed in my car, I had a heck of a time programming this new remote for it. I’m writing this blog post to share my lessons with other people who might be googling for help.

Getting the remote. The Sidewinder is one of a large line of security systems and other car electronics manufactured by Directed Electronics. Many of their systems use the same remote transmitters, and DEI remotes come in two flavors, which I’ll call annoying and reasonable. The annoying remotes use a combined lock/unlock button, which means you press the same button when approaching the car in a parking lot as you do when leaving it in your driveway. The reasonable remotes have separate lock and unlock buttons, like just about every other keyless fob on earth. (The only advantage I can see in the annoying remotes is for people with multiple cars — you could program a single four-button remote to operate up to 4 cars.) My previous remote was a DEI RPN (remote party number) 476T — of the reasonable line. Apparently this remote is old enough that their store doesn’t even sell it anymore, but I found one at RadToys Central.

Programming. As you can find on many websites, all DEI alarm systems are programmed for new transceivers in the same basic way: open a door, turn your ignition to ON, press the valet button a number of times to select the function to program, and then, while holding the valet button, press the transceiver buttons you want to use. This is all confirmed with a nice series of chirps and flashes of the status LED.

That’s a nice straightforward process, if your alarm is set up properly. I had no siren, no LED, no valet button, and a disconnected door trigger wire. So I had to hack a few things together:

To convince the alarm I had opened the door, I had to connect the door trigger wire (the VIOLET wire, strangely described as NO FUNCTION in the wiring guide imprinted on the alarm unit) to +12V power. I used an unbent paperclip wrapped in electrical tape to connect violet to red in the big plastic multi-connector at the top of the alarm unit; please be careful if you decide to attempt something similar.

In place of the valet switch, I connected a “reset” button harvested from an old computer case. If you don’t have a spare button, you can probably get away with connecting and disconnecting a jumper, or if you have excellent motor skills, tapping the valet pins with a screwdriver head.

I connected an LED as well, but that didn’t help with anything. A siren would have been nice, so I could hear the confirming chirps.

Anyway, the final programming sequence was this:

1. Open a door. In other words, bridge VIOLET to RED using insulated wire (tape-covered paperclip).
2. Turn key to the run position. Luckily the yellow wire was actually connected!
3. Choose function. Much easier with a button than with a screwdriver, but possible either way.
   • On the Sidewinder 3000ESP, one valet button press lets you program a remote for the annoying single-button behavior. This was stupid-looking and confusing on my remote, which has four buttons, including actual separate lock and unlock buttons. To set the standard four-button program on my Sidewinder 3000ESP, I had to press the button seven times. (That took a while to figure out.)
4. Transmit. After pressing seven times, hold the valet button and transmit from your remote. I just used the LOCK button, but if you’re setting the standard four-button program you might be able to use any button.
5. Release. Let go of the valet “button”, disconnect the fake door-open trigger, grab your keys and exit the car. Test your remote. It should work!

One more thing: In addition to the big connector on top of the alarm unit, and the well-labeled connections on the side for the LED, valet button, and lock/unlock, there is an unlabeled connector at the bottom of the unit. Plugged into this I found a two-foot-long wire connected to… nothing. So I disconnected it. Later, I noticed that my transmitter only worked when I was within about 8 feet of the car. Turns out it was the antenna.

Good luck!

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I'm not a big fan of Chrysler's recent bling-ified production designs. But the Chrysler Firepower show car is just gorgeous. Check out that interior! This car has style far beyond the ugly agglomerations of doodads one expects from Detroit.

Looking for directions between my house and the Boston airport shows a
surprising degree of variation between map services. Check this out:

This is a tricky example. As the crow flies, the Boston airport is rather
close to my house— probably 6 miles. The airport is in East Boston,
which is accessible via underwater tunnels from downtown Boston (there is a
bridge from Chelsea but that's far out of the way). There are at least two
different possible tunnels to East Boston, each of which connects to a
different highway out of downtown (I-93 or I-90), neither of which is
especially convenient to my place. There is also the option of exiting the
tunnels onto a fast non-interstate road (Storrow Dr.), which is scenic but
not direct, or to drive on city streets, which is geographically direct but
involves slower traffic and more stoplights. On top of this, while I'm
fairly confident the Yahoo/Google route to the airport is optimal,
I'm not sure how reversible this route is because the tunnel away
from the airport is not exactly adjacent to the one coming in.

In other words, the mapping services disagree on the return path, but so
do I— I've taken at least 3 different, reasonable paths home as well
as getting lost a few times. Times have ranged from 18 minutes to over 30
(with a jaunt through the industrial areas of Medford; whoops).

I wonder, is the route to my house from Logan Airport just a damned
tricky route to optimize? Or are the different services needlessly stupid
and divergent?

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When choosing an armored vehicle, it's important to keep in mind how badly someone wants you dead.

A very well written article. Especially if they're out to get you.

I'm surprisingly excited about taking my car in for service for the first time. It's in the hands of the highly-recommended Colonial Auto Service. It's been having trouble starting, and also needs an oil change and probably new brake pads.

The trouble with starting was illustrated today in the mechanic's driveway. I drove in past a snow plow and parked where I thought he had already plowed. Once the mechanic explained that I had parked in the way, I gave him the keys and… rev rev *click*.

While I went inside to give my information to the other guy, the first mechanic was getting my car started. I think he hooked a jumper battery up to my car's battery, and eventually got the thing started. Then I watched him pull the car around, with the hood still up, with lots of wheel spinning and some sliding.

Now, this would probably scare some people, but I am quite happy to see the experts at work. What's making me feel great right now is the expectation that this evening, my car will once again be running perfectly. Probably with a new starter motor.

Update: The car has been fixed. Turns out it was the battery, not starter motor, which is good. Also, the brakes are in fine shape.

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Philip Greenspun has a thought-provoking post, Maybe teenage pregnancy is a good thing:

Now that I'm 40 years old most of my friends are in their riper years. The women who are trying to have children in their late 30s and early 40s are going through torture. Hormones, needles, in-vitro fertilization, miscarriages, etc. Maybe teenage pregnancy isn't such a bad idea after all. I wonder if in pre-industrial societies it wasn't the case that the grandparents did most of the child-rearing that required judgement and experience. The teenage girl did the child-bearing but was still living surrounded by extended family so that her 30-35-year-old mom and mother-in-law could provide adult guidance for the baby. Perhaps we believe that teenage pregnancy is bad only because our family structures have been broken up.

This follows up on another insightful post on the problems with high school, one speculating that home-schooled kids have better manners, and a few others. I tried to find a unifying thread for this recurring source of rant. Here's the comment I left:

Actually, you're onto something here. Teenage pregnancy is risky in modern Western society because it reduces the opportunity for a girl to become a productive participant in the economy. But with child-rearing, you can easily spread out the work if you have a geographically clustered, trustworthy group. This is traditionally the extended family, a structure which is now rare but can perhaps be replaced by a more geographically convenient "adopted" family (as Christopher Alexander suggests in A Pattern Language).

Similarly, the abomination that is the factory high school is also mandated by the combination of nuclear families and economic convention. Proper consumer living requires both parents to work, which is only feasible when the kids can be supervised during the workday. It's no wonder that teenagers, restrained in the artificial world of the suburban high school, often fail to learn that their actions have consequences and act out with violent music or crime. They don't need to get the best tutors in India; just doing real work in any real town could teach them important practical and social skills far better than the years of health and speech classes.

Oh, you can also blame the disintegration of the extended family for suburban sprawl, the SUV, exploding health care costs, and epidemic overdependence on psychiatrists. Funny that the "family values" types are so worried now, as if there's much more to lose.

Shimon Rura - 7/18/04; 11:39:58 PM

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Via the Autoblog, here's something you should try to avoid doing even though it looks pretty cool. Still, that's some pretty good air for a Mercury Sable.

Tonight at 10:16pm on the way back from a work conference, I failed to yeild going into the Concord rotary on Rt. 2. My mistake entirely; I must have been very tired and misjudged the distance. Worst of all, I failed to yield to a cop.

I was very apologetic and polite, and he let me off with a warning. If you factor in increased insurance premiums along with the ticket itself, a ticket would have cost me at least $700. So thank you, officer. I'll drive more carefully in the future.

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According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford's S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls." Toyota's top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills." One of Ford's senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a.m."