radio head unit hacking; exhaust center section.

[davidpertuz at mindspring.com]

Ya know, I thought of Make 'zine about 30 sec after I hit 'send' on my message....

Thanks for reminding me of the obvious re: the CD player input, Kevin - I had totally forgotten about that.

David

-----Original Message-----
>From: Kevin Hart <bowlcut at gmail.com>
>Sent: Oct 17, 2008 5:04 PM
>To: Matt Hunt <mhunt at ecin.net>, davidpertuz at mindspring.com, se-r at se-r-list.org
>Subject: Re: radio head unit hacking; exhaust center section.
>
>On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Matt Hunt <mhunt at ecin.net> wrote:
>> davidpertuz at mindspring.com wrote:
>>> Have any one of y'all hacked an OE radio to provide an AUX input
>>> jack? I don't know what the workings of those radio are like, but it
>>> seems pretty reasonable that there is some sort of signal input line
>>> or circuit that you could splice a line into, then run it out the
>>> back of the casing and out to the console somewhere. I've to a spare
>>> '91 radio to practice on if I can find it.
>>
>> Check out Make: at http://makezine.com. I did a quick search on "aux
>> input car stereo" and there are a bunch of hits. You could poke through
>> some of those projects and see (in detail) how people went about hacking
>> their car radios. It's a great geeky site for lots of other DIY projects
>> as well.
>>
>> matt
>
>
>One other thing to look at is the various 'cd changer' style aux in's.
> Most classic head units had the option for the cd player on them, the
>one that went down instead of the pocket.  What you do is tap that
>plug.  Its a big din style plug.  The secret with it, is you have to
>supply 12v in, to make it think the cd player is there, before it will
>let audio in to it.  But that will do the trick most of the time.
>
>Second option is to use a fm transmitter that plugs in to the antenna
>plug in the head unit.  You get really crisp sound that way, better
>than the cig lighter models.  but still has all the issues that most
>all fm transmitters have.
>
>Third is if the tape deck still works, just use a tape adapter.  they
>will sound the best of 'non hacking' type of inputs of above.  They
>can be found for cheap and work quite well, until the tape deck
>dies...like on my Altima.
>
>Last....just buy a new head unit with a 3.5mm in jack.  Or better yet,
>ipod input with controls or the such.  You can find most head units
>these days with 3.5mm jacks, and under 200 dollars.
>
>-Kevin
>+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>The mailing list home page is http://www.se-r-list.org/
>To modify your subscription, go to http://www.se-r-list.org/mailman/listinfo/se-r