By Kevin Dady
When you have an older vehicle, there are not a lot of options in the stock stereo department, often a CD player and tape deck is what you get. When you want to play your tunes from your mobile, what do you do? Buying an adapter, or a new head unit for that matter, isn’t any fun. So why not hack it?
This isn’t just a mechanical marriage of a Bluetooth dongle and an elderly stereo. Some real work went into convincing the stereo that the BT receiver was the stock tape deck.
Attacking the outdated Cassette deck kolonelkadat knew that inside the maze of gears and leavers, most of it is moving around actuating switches to let the radio know that there is a tape inside and that it can switch to that input and play. Tricking the radio into thinking there is a tape inserted is handled by an Arduino. Using a logic analyzer kolonelkadat figured out what logic signals the original unit put out and replicating that in his Arduino code.
Audio is handled by the guts of a bluetooth speaker with the output redirected into the radio where the signal coming off the tape head normally would have been directed.
When you have an older vehicle, there are not a lot of options in the stock stereo department, often a CD player and tape deck is what you get. When you want to play your tunes from your mobile, what do you do? Buying an adapter, or a new head unit for that matter, isn’t any fun. So why not hack it?
This isn’t just a mechanical marriage of a Bluetooth dongle and an elderly stereo. Some real work went into convincing the stereo that the BT receiver was the stock tape deck.
Attacking the outdated Cassette deck kolonelkadat knew that inside the maze of gears and leavers, most of it is moving around actuating switches to let the radio know that there is a tape inside and that it can switch to that input and play. Tricking the radio into thinking there is a tape inserted is handled by an Arduino. Using a logic analyzer kolonelkadat figured out what logic signals the original unit put out and replicating that in his Arduino code.
Audio is handled by the guts of a bluetooth speaker with the output redirected into the radio where the signal coming off the tape head normally would have been directed.