Clutch

Audio

Fixing Pioneer AVH-W4400NEX flaky screen

Problem: Headunit screen would glitch out like a cable was loose. Eventually died completely where it would enter a boot loop showing “Pioneering loading…” head to the “splash screen” and then glitch and repeat or goto a black screen with the bottom blue buttons illuminated.

Solution: After researching this problem, it was not due to a loose cable but rather poor storage medium and becoming corrupted. The solution is to replace the SD card the firmware is stored on.

  1. Order a high speed or ultra high speed SD card. I chose this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H9J1YXN. You need at least 16GB. I recommend not using a random SD card you might have and trying to find one with good read/write speeds. I used an older SD card first and it worked but performance was crappy. Replacing with a high speed card resolved this issue
  2. Download the firmware, an image does not appear to be directly available from pioneer. There is a forum that stores the file AVIC-4400NEX-1.02-IMAGE.zip here which I used, or alternative check the thread here
  3. Flash the image to the SD card, on macOS I used balenaetcher
  4. Remove the head unit from your dash. It’s a good practice to take a picture of what cables are connected to the back of the unit before disconnecting anything.
  5. Take off the removable display from the head unit.
  6. Pull out the slide mechanism. This is shown in the above video at 2:45 to 3:43
  7. Disconnect the ribbon cable from the back of the slide mechanism. Watch from 10:08 to 10:55
  8. Remove the black plastic trim. Watch from 3:43 to 4:27
  9. Swap the SD card
  10. Reassemble