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1965 Porsche 356C

1965 Porsche 356C wired with the Infinitybox System.

1965 Porsche 356C wired with the Infinitybox System.

We recently received these pictures of a beautiful 1965 Porsche 356C from a customer.  He’s had this car for a few years and wants it to be his daily driver.  He’s made a bunch of modifications to this car to improve its reliability and drivability.  He had the ignition system upgraded, he made suspension enhancements and he wanted the car completely rewired.  He knew that he wanted the car wired with the Infinitybox system.  He wanted the reliability, simplicity and modern features that the system could offer.

This blog post is going to hit the highlights of the install and the cell locations.  Watch for a series of videos that will come out of this showing more details on how you can wire your car with the Infinitybox system.  You can catch these videos on our blog or on our YouTube channel.

He installed the 20-Circuit Harness Kit as a base in the car.  This includes one MASTERCELL and two POWERCELLs.  The MASTERCELL was mounted in the front trunk area, just in front of the dashboard.  This made it really easy to connect the MASTERCELL input wires to the switches, including the turn signals, head lights, high beams, brake pedal, ignition and starter.  In this picture, you can see a good view of the MASTERCELL location.

Infinitybox MASTERCELL mounted under the hood of a 1965 Porsche 356C

Infinitybox MASTERCELL mounted under the hood of a 1965 Porsche 356C

This picture shows another view of the MASTERCELL.  You can see the CAN cable running down the right edge of the trunk area.  This is going to the front POWERCELL.

Another shot of the Infinitybox MASTERCELL in a 1965 Porsche 356C

Another shot of the Infinitybox MASTERCELL in a 1965 Porsche 356C

The front POWERCELL is mounted in the well behind the spare tire.  The front POWERCELL is controlling the head lights, the high beams, the parking lights, the turn signals, the horns, the gauges and the wipers.  This location up front is ideal because it keeps the runs of wire short.

That is also where we have the inRESERVE solenoid and the fuses protecting the power feeds from the battery.  This pictures shows the location of the front POWERCELL, the battery, the inRESERVE solenoid and the primary fuses.

Battery, inRESERVE system and front POWERCELL located in a 1965 Porsche 356C

Battery, inRESERVE system and front POWERCELL located in a 1965 Porsche 356C

he rear POWERCELL is in the engine compartment, tucked away in the back-right corner.  Just like the front POWERCELL, this location is ideal because everything is close to the POWERCELL.  It is powering the turn signals, the brake lights, the back-up lights, the ignition and the starter solenoid.  We also left a provision for an electric fuel pump for when the customer wants to add that.  The longest run of wire that we had from this POWERCELL was about 4 feet to the left light cluster.  This picture shows the rear POWERCELL mounted in the engine compartment.

Rear POWERCELL wired into a 1965 Porsche 356C

Rear POWERCELL wired into a 1965 Porsche 356C

A lot of people ask if they can mount their POWERCELLs in the engine compartment.  The answer is yes.  We designed and tested the POWERCELLs to survive in the extreme conditions found under the hood.  This includes temperature extremes, thermal shocks, mechanical shocks, vibration and chemical exposure.

If you have any questions about our system or its capabilities, give our team a call at (847) 232-1991 or email us at sales@infinitybox.com.  You can contact us directly by clicking this link.  

Wiring a switch with an indicator

The inputs to the Infinitybox MASTERCELL are very easy to use.  You simply connect the input wire to a switch and ground the other side.  When you turn on the switch, the input gets connected to ground, which tells the MASTERCELL to turn on a POWERCELL output.  You can get your ground connection from either the ground wires that we supply in the MASTERCELL harness or you can connect them right to ground on your chassis.  This approach reduces the total number of wires that you need to go to your switch and lets us a very small gauge of wire to connect to the switch.

Sometimes, a customer wants to use a switch that has an indicator light built into it.  That is very easy to do with the addition of a few simple components.

Here is an example of a popular switch that a lot of our customers use.  It is a simple, round toggle switch.  There is an LED built into the switch that can light up the rocker when the switch is in the on position.  You can purchase a switch like this from Waytek by clicking this link.

Image showing how to wire a switch with an Indicator Light to the Infinitybox MASTERCELL

Image showing how to wire a switch with an Indicator Light to the Infinitybox MASTERCELL

The important thing to note here is that you MUST install a diode in the input wire from the MASTERCELL to the switch.  This should be a 1N4001 diode and can be purchased on-line.  Please note that the direction of the diode is very important.  The stripe on the diode should be on the side of the wire that is connected to the switch, not the side going to the MASTERCELL.

You can get your 12-volts from anywhere in the car.  If you want, you can use Ignition power from the POWERCELL for the indicators.  That way your switches will only light when the ignition to the car is on.  Alternately, you can wire this directly to a constant power supply from the battery.

Also note that the polarity of the wiring to the switch is important.  Make sure that you are looking at the wiring diagram that came with your switch and referencing our wiring diagram.

If you follow these simple instructions, your switch indicators will light up when you turn on the switch.  You can download a PDF version of this wiring diagram by clicking this link.

If you have any additional questions about this wiring diagram, please reach out to our technical support team at (847) 232-1991 or email us at sales@infinitybox.com.  You can also contact our team by clicking this link.  

10-Circuit vs. 20-Circuit Kits

A lot of people ask: “Do I need a 10 or a 20-Circuit Harness Kit for my car?”  The answer is, it depends. Both the 10 and 20-Circuit Harness Kits use our rock-solid multiplexing technology.  The only difference between the kits is the number of POWERCELLs that you get.  The 10-Circuit Kit gets you one MASTERCELL and one POWERCELL.  The 20-Circuit Kit gets you one MASTERCELL and two POWERCELLs. Each POWERCELL has 10 outputs.  When you sit down and look at the number of things that you have to control in a basic car, you can handle most all of them with the 10 outputs on a 10-Circuit Kit.  This includes things like the starter solenoid, ECU power, headlights, turn signals, parking lights, etc.  Wiring your car with a 10-Circuit Kit can be a lower cost option to get more advanced features in your car.  You have the option to add practically any of our Infinitybox accessories to the 10-Circuit Kit including inLINK for security functions, inTOUCH NET for touch screen control and inMOTION to control windows and power locks. Going up to the 20-Circuit Harness Kit gets you some significant advantages over the 10-Circuit Kit.

  1. The extra POWERCELL gets you 10 more outputs.  This gives you more flexibility to control more things through the Infinitybox system.
  2. Having two POWERCELLs lets you put them where you need them in the car.  With two POWERCELLs, you can place one in the front of the car and one in the rear.  This means that you’re running less wire because you can wire things to the local POWERCELL.  Examples here include the turn signals, which are on the front & rear of the car.  The parking lights are another example since they are in the front and rear of the car.  With the single POWERCELL in the 2-Cell Kit, you have to run all of the wire back to a central location.  With multiple POWERCELLs you have more flexibility and can run less wire.
  3. The extra POWERCELL in the 20-Circuit Kit gets you more flexibility to control your tail lights and turn signals.  A lot of late 1960’s cars use a single filament of one bulb on each side of the car for both the brake lights and the turn signals.  We call this a single-filament configuration.  The filament on each side of the car flashes independently as a turn signal or both sides turn on together when you step on the brake lights.  The 20-Circuit Kit is set up to manage this turn-signal and brake light function within Infinitybox.  You can’t do this directly with the 10-Circuit Kit because you only have one set of outputs for the turn-signals spliced to the front and rear of the car.  If you did this with the 10-Circuit Kit, your front turn signals would turn on when you stepped on the brake pedal.  There is a fix for the 10-Circuit Kit in a car that needs a single-filament configuration that involves a trailer converter.  Give our tech guys a call if you want to go this way.

The other thing to consider is that the 10-Circuit Kit may not get you all of the outputs that you need to make your car street legal.  Talk to our team to verify.

We have a configuration sheet specific for the 10-Circuit Kit.  Click on this link to see it.  This link will take you to an example of one of our 20-Circuit Harness Kit configurations.  This one is for our front-engine set up. At the end of the day, you can wire a basic car easily with our 10-Circuit Kit.  You get all of the benefits and add-on capability of the entire Infinitybox system.  However, adding the extra POWERCELL expands the flexibility of the system significantly. Click here to contact our team with any additional questions.