453 GPS Important Update

453 Smart GPS Week Rollover Bug

PSA: Media-System in smart 453 is affected by the GPS Week Number Rollover bug.

You MUST have updated before April 6th, 2019 in order to keep the time working correctly.

Hey folks!

On April 6th, 2019, GPS will experience a Week Number Rollover. Basically, the GPS counts weeks starting from Sunday 6 January 1980, and since it can only count up to 1024 weeks at a time, it reverts to 0 roughly every 20 years. This already happened once in 1999, and will happen again in 2019.

What does this mean if you drive a smart 453 with a smart Media-System? Well, the bad news is that if you don’t do anything, your car will stop displaying the time or display it incorrectly, and if you use the built-in TomTom navigation, it will display incorrect arrival times, among other potential issues. Notice below, the time has been replaced with -:–

The good news, however, is that you can install an update yourself to prevent these issues.
Smart provides instructions on how to do so.

In short:

1. Download this file: http://download.tomtom.com/sweet/navcore/daimler/smart/TOMTOM.000

2. Format a USB drive as FAT32. Don’t use one more than 16GB.

3. Copy the file you’ve downloaded onto the USB drive. Don’t copy any other files, and don’t rename the TOMTOM.000 file.

4. Plug the USB drive into your smart.

5. It will prompt you to install an update. Select “yes”. It then starts updating.

6. Wait for about 15 minutes. During which, it’ll show a couple of different screens.

Eventually it’ll say it’s done. Tap on OK.

You should have a time (not the correct time) shown on the speedo.

The radio screen will revert back to normal but…

…you’ll probably notice that the time hasn’t changed…

…yet. It’s because the time is taken from the GPS signal received from GPS satellites. You will have to leave the car out in the open so the GPS antenna can communicate with at least 3 satellites. It needs 3 signals to triangulate your position and work out your local time from those signals.

You can check that the correct version was installed under Menu > System > Status & Information > Version information > next to “Application”. The correct version number should start with “11.344”.

Android Auto Update

For those who followed my tutorial from last year to activate Android Auto on a 2015/2016 smart 453, and updated to version 11.343 in the process, you do still need to update to version 11.344 to avoid the WNRO bug. However, I can confirm that Android Auto still works properly with 11.344.

Credits

Thanks to Neelfyn for contacting me about this today (22/02/2019).
Neelfyn is the guy who worked out the Android Auto update that I posted here and is now everywhere online. He is the reason I looked at DDT4All and noticed other coding opportunities.