Next Hair-Brained Idea - Need Input

[george graves]

I love your work - subscribed!!!!!!!!

[bmwman91]

Thanks guys. I guess I need to deliver the goods now!

I'll probably open up a new thread once I actually get some work going. This one was sort of geared at getting initial ideas & planning (which still isn't quite finished).

Speaking of which...should I bother with Bluetooth, USB & Aux Input?
- BT...I doubt I will ever buy the adapter. If I really need to make a call in the car I usually break the law & talk on it, but it is rare that I do.
- USB...I will never own an iPod. Friends have them, but it would be rare that I would have them hook it up. Then again, I wouldn't need iPod control since they could run it. I MIGHT use a USB drive though. I am not sure how much work I want to put into that part of the interface.
- Aux Input...This seems like the most likely way I'd connect an external player, not that I plan to have one myself.

How far do you guys want me to take this? 100% full functionality? Getting it all working to an acceptable level will take a lot of programming to begin with, so I am not sure if I want to deal with all the various interfaces (other than radio, CD & the menus).

[pegase747]

BMWMAN91,

Sounds like a great idea and i am curious to see what you can do...

By the way, you didn't like the sound of your CD43 with the LC6i and 6XS coupled with the MBQuart amp ??

This setup looked really nice to me, must've sounded great ?

Pierre

[N2MYE30]

Aux input is all that I request. Sub'd.

[StereoInstaller1]

BMWMAN91,

Sounds like a great idea and i am curious to see what you can do...

By the way, you didn't like the sound of your CD43 with the LC6i and 6XS coupled with the MBQuart amp ??

This setup looked really nice to me, must've sounded great ?

Pierre

He nicknamed his deck "Skippy"

[bmwman91]

The CD43 skips badly (probably my fault, I wasn't nice to it), and I would really like basic stuff like track play time & such. Radio reception is terrible too since it was used on newer cars with antenna amplifiers.

As far as sound quality goes, ALL HEAD UNITS SOUND THE SAME. They all use the same 4 channel single-chip amplifiers (there are 2 or 3 manufacturers of them, and the specs are almost identical across them all). There isn't enough room in single-DIN HUs for a proper discrete-component amp setup, nor is there a large enough market of people willing to pay for it (or that can tell the difference).

[pegase747]

Oh I see.
Simple solution would be to find another CD43 which is not skipping, but i see you like challenges !

Great stuff, that will be something to follow up, and i am looking forward to seeing this projest starting.

Have fun

Pierre

[bmwman91]

The challenge aspect is definitely one part of it.

The other part is me not liking to waste money. I already spent $310 to get a CD43 with BMW Business CD printed on it, and I am not about to do that again. It just isn't worth it because the CD43 is less capable & no better sounding than a $50 no-name head unit.

[Schnitzer318is]

Sub'd...

This could be very interesting... I applaud your abilities sir.

[blalor]

Impressive, William! I'm not ready to give up on my CD53 yet, tho. I'm really happy with my iPod adapter (thinking about trying to sell a batch) and the CD43 doesn't appear to do Sirius. Would you mind posting a picture of the connection between the display and the main board? The '53 uses an 18-connector flat flexible cable (FFC? FPC?) and I found the connector on Digi-Key. I could pretty easily make a break-out board to start sniffing the protocol between them. We might be able to work together to make an adapter…

Interesting that team members from both sides of the Adafruit/Microsoft Kinect hack showdown are represented in this thread. :D

[bmwman91]

Impressive, William! I'm not ready to give up on my CD53 yet, tho. I'm really happy with my iPod adapter (thinking about trying to sell a batch) and the CD43 doesn't appear to do Sirius. Would you mind posting a picture of the connection between the display and the main board? The '53 uses an 18-connector flat flexible cable (FFC? FPC?) and I found the connector on Digi-Key. I could pretty easily make a break-out board to start sniffing the protocol between them. We might be able to work together to make an adapter…

Interesting that team members from both sides of the Adafruit/Microsoft Kinect hack showdown are represented in this thread. :D

Ask, and you shall receive.

http://www.e30tuner.com/assist/cd43info/CD43_Schematic.pdf

http://www.e30tuner.com/assist/cd43info/CD43_Service_Manual.pdf

http://www.e30tuner.com/assist/cd43info/KD-AHD69J-HDR60J_Service_Manual.pdf

Unfortunately, my usual source doesn't seem to have the CD53 service manual (I put in a request, maybe someone has it). It is an Alpine unit, correct? The protocol might be the same for the it & the CD43, although I do find that a little unlikely. Get a logic analyzer on there! I'll probably be coming in to work this weekend to use one on the CD43.

Oh man, I hate trying to find connectors on DigiKey. It is a rare (and happy) day when I can find one that is actually what I need for a hacking project!

The developments being pursued with Kinect are interesting, on all sides. I have a feeling that entertainment & computing interfaces/interaction will be changing dramatically in the next 5 to 10 years, and those that are at the forefront of it will do well. I have no idea what my employer's official position is on this stuff, so I'll have to remain vague for now lol (sorry). I'm a console hardware guy anyway!

I've always been a Microchip guy, but I am sort of curious about the AVR stuff (which I would imagine that you know a lot more about). Maybe I should check some out. This project could really use a uC with 3 or 4 buffered SPI interfaces & >10MIPS (8b core is fine). I doubt I'll find much with that many SPI interfaces though, so I may have to resort to the usual "use the fastest crystal I can & try to run the main loop gauntlet faster than the obstacles can jam through the IOs." This one is definitely getting done in assembly...(I suck at C anyway).

[blalor]

Wow! Those are impressive schematics. Thanks! I'm frankly shocked that there's a service manual for the CD43. I figured we were long past the point where anyone bothered to try to repair these things. :)

This appears to be the connector for the ribbon between the main board and the display on the CD53. I haven't measured to be sure, but it looks identical: I spent half an hour with a visor, tweezers, and super glue reattaching the tabs that hold the brown lock lever in place…

My CD53 is Alpine but for some reason I think I've seen a reference to a Blaupunkt incarnation of it, too. I do have a USB DSO with a 7-channel logic analyzer; I'll have to see if I can get anything useful out of there. The CD43 looks to have a weird combination of discrete lines for individual buttons (like eject) and the SPI bus. Seems a little disjointed; obviously the CD1-6, AM, FM, and other buttons must be carried over SPI.

Not realizing that there was SPI in play here, I was thinking that I could probably connect each line to an input on an ATmega328 (all 18 lines would be no problem, with room for serial output) and use interrupts to capture the output and send it to a computer. That may be too naïve, but then I'm new to this reverse engineering thing. Maybe I should pick up a copy of "Hacking the XBox". ;)

I've only been tinkering with microcontrollers for a couple of years; I'm an enterprise Java developer by day. I got started with the Arduino, so yeah, I've only seen AVRs so far. I'm finding limits to the Arduino libraries so I'm trying to break out into the "pure" avr-libc stuff. I don't do assembly and Microchip doesn't appear to have a free C compiler, so I don't think I'll be playing with any PICs anytime soon.

I'm now thinking that it might be neat to transplant the face from a CD43 onto the CD53. Not for the superb sound quality, but because I can^W might be able to.

[bmwman91]

You should learn to work in assembly. For stuff that isn't time/timing critical, C is fine. When it comes down to bit-banging for communication & data acquisition on smaller devices that lack fancy peripherals, assembly is where it is at. In my opinion, the greatest device in the universe is the PIC12F683. Eight DIP pins of joy lol. You also free yourself from whatever limitations might be in the C libraries (that were developed in assembly anyway). The student version of the Microchip C compiler is free & isn't really handicapped too much (it just doesn't have as much code optimization), but you aren't supposed to use it for stuff you profit from.

The big challenge here will be dealing with the JVC motherboard thinking it is the master SPI device (and not taking any SPI input from the faceplate), & the CD43 faceplate that is a slave, but has SPI inputs & outputs. It is going to be an ugly mix of asynchronous data transmissions since the JVD motherboard doesn't expect to have to wait for the faceplate to be "ready." The few buttons that actually have analog outputs will be cake...I just need to be faster than the human response time. I feel like I am turning to the dark side these days (software & EE...my background is in ME) with all these electronics projects.

Which USB scope are you using? I have been looking at getting one for myself for a while. The PICoscope stuff looks very nice, and the gear I want is just hovering on that price line where I would rather just come to work & use their stuff (which costs more than whatever house I buy someday).

Once I get the CD43 faceplate protocol worked out I will post up the findings. Maybe it will be a direct swap onto the CD53.

[blalor]

I've got a Link MSO-19. It works fairly well (in XP under VMWare on my Mac), but it's only got a single oscilloscope channel. I think I've only used the logic analyzer once and didn't find it that useful. The LA does NOT decode RS232 serial which would be really helpful, but it does do SPI and I2C. I'm thinking about ditching it in favor of the Rigol DS1052E; if I'd known about that scope when I bought mine a year or so ago I would have gotten it then. If you're interested, I think I can make you a good deal on the MSO-19.

[pegase747]

BMWMAN91,


Maybe a stupid question as I don't know shit, but would it be possible to connect some RCA leads on the CD43 BEFORE the internal preamps ??

Cheers Pierre