tongboy
Veteran Member
i'm still using the hydraulic switch in my rabbit - as you said there is a normally open and normally closed switch in the modern brake switch, however I hard wired my clutch switch and my normally closed brake switch to ground so they don't affect the cruise system at all (prevent it from turning on or disable it if they are pressed) the only brake switch wiring I have is tied directly off the wiring that goes to the brake lights - the brake lights turn on and the cruise turns off, I get an improbable signal code for the brake light switch all the time but it works just fine.rsxsr said:I am using the OE brake pedal switch from a 98 New Beetle on my vanagon. From memory. The description of the switch operation is correct, but I found the ECU needed to see the brake light bulbs to keep a code from showing up. The ECU gets a ground through the actual brake bulb filaments when off. When the pedal is depressed and the bulbs light, the ECU sees this change of state.
I am aware of this, because on the vanagon, I was using the original hydraulic pressure switches to activate the brake lights and the pedal switch to "talk" to the ecu. Not until I moved the brake lights onto the two way pedal switch did the code go away. I then worked on getting the cruise to work. My ECU was not coded for cruise control out of the box. It took two tries for the ECU to accept the cruise control.
and to the op - you have to address the brake and clutch switches that tell the ecu that the pedals are currently in the rest position or you'll never be able to turn the cruise on because the ecu believes that one of those pedals is down - it's a simple binary output in the ECU view, either the pedal switch is on or off and that will potentially prevent the cruise from firing up.
on the VSS wire - I fought with this a little as well. you have two options with it (I haven't tested the second but I'm told it'll work) output from the vss on the tranny to the cluster and then output from the cluster back to the ECU. the pinout of the cluster depends on which style you're using, i'm using a mk3 CE2 cluster and as I recall the vss output signal is block 2 pin 12 or 14, the wiring diagrams list the input wire to the ECU but it's tricky to run down exactly how they describe it. the other option is to bypass the cluster and run the vss signal directly to the ecu.
without a vag com it's going ot be really hard to diagnose that all your switches are working and your vss signal is being recieved by the ECU. i'd really recommend picking up a knockoff vag com cable on ebay for 20 bucks - i've been using mine without issue for a number of years now with great success