Tricking a Car Stereo to Think Your Cellphone is a Tapedeck

When you have an older vehicle there’s 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Attacking the outdated Cassette deck [kolonelkadat] knew that inside the maze of gears and leavers, most of it is moving around actuating switches to let the radio know that there is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. Join us after the break for a couple of videos with all of the details.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, musical hacks, radio hacks

via Hackaday » radio hacks http://ift.tt/1MqJnYm