Kia Sportage luxury feature hacking (with schematic)

This module appears to be used in many vehicles as a luxury feature. I was tempted by the Porsche one, but not at £250! It's basically a bipolar ionizer for cars, with the output scaled down for the smaller space. This used Kia unit cost a tenner on eBay. You can apparently buy them on AliExpress new for a similar amount.

In operation, what these units actually do is staggering. Especially given their ultra low power usage (About 1.5W in turbo mode). They apply a high positive and negative voltage between two sharp emitters that results in a huge amount of electrons flowing through the air between them. That results in a tiny corona discharge (purple glow of ionized air) that is literally a molecular lab in a pinhead. It strips apart air molecules into their component atoms and allows them to recombine in the short-lived energised state that occurs in nature to manage air quality. Those active molecules will actively combine with contaminants, viruses and spores, deactivating them in the process.

Japan is notable for having air processing like this in almost every home. And it's worth mentioning that any dehumidifier or HEPA air filter unit that has an "ioniser" function includes something similar. (But don't tell the Karen's - because they think everything technical is bad.)

This unit is fairly complex and took several hours to reverse engineer with a few sanity breaks. But the circuitry is interesting, so it was worth it. Better still, there's no microcontroller, so it can be hot-wired to operate without a fancy control system. Here are the wiring details:-

Thick orange wire - positive 12-15V
Thick black wire - negative/chassis
Thin red wire with white stripe - enable - connect to positive via a 10K resistor.
Thin brown wire - "ion" - connect to positive via a 10K resistor to reduce output.
Thin green wire with white stripe - "dig" - operational indicator - can be ignored.

You can also buy a bare automotive bipolar ioniser module on AliExpress that uses even less power for a similar effect:-
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32914...

Or for the full unit search for the keywords "kia ionizer".


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