Project: Jetson's Car

Stereo beginnings

The hardest part of this project for me is going to be the electronics interface. I've taken one EE course in digital electronics, and I've toyed around with some simple circuits before using do-it-yourself type books, but my theoretical knowledge is close to zero, so I'm not very good at coming up with circuit designs on my own. I do have the ability to learn new things, though, so I'm hoping I can pick up whatever I need.

As I mentioned yesterday, now that I have some rudimentary speech recognition, I would like to try controlling my stereo from a computer connection. One thing that may help me is the fact that my car stereo has a removable face - this means that there is a very well-defined interface point between the controls (the face) and the brains (the non-face part).

As you can see, there is a 15-pin connection that connects the face to the back matter (I really wish I had a better name for that). The next sub-goal of this project is to hook up wires running from the back matter to the face. Using an oscilloscope (no I don't have one of these, and yes, I know they are expensive), I can hopefully eavesdrop on the signals that are sent between the two parts. By experimenting and pressing buttons on the face I should be able to capture signals, and then later try to replicate these out on the ports of my laptop. The stuff I wrote yesterday about speech recognition was trivial for me, but this stuff, which is probably trivial to any EE undergrad, leaves me utterly afraid. Okay, Tim, take a deep breath, relax, and begin to subdivide the task. Thank you other voice in my head, I feel much better now.

The first sub-sub-goal is now to come up with the wire connections between the face and the back matter. If I can't get this right, then there is no point in even worrying about an oscilloscope. There are some pictures below of the sides of the back matter/face connection.

As you can see, there are little pins sticking out on each side that grab onto holes on the side of the face. One possibility is that I can make use of those to make a wire connection that is able to hold itself in place using natural methods. Honestly, I'll probably just tape some wires onto a piece of wood, which itself will be taped to the car dash.