Tonight iPod in Honda Civic Work

Click for more…

Yes, I know that’s not the most impressive photo, but that’s the completion of my work tonight. I ended up making a new and much better PCB with which to tie everything together, mounted the filter and resistor, installed the second grommet in the case, soldered on the previously made Aux In cable, added the power cable, hacked in a fuse for the power cable, and called it a night.

So, yeah. Now the only things left to do are tear into the dash again, finally assemble and bolt in the iPod holder, run the iPod dock cable through the base of the stuff pocket in the console (whoops, need to purchase another 7/16OD x 1/4ID grommet), add the ends to the power cable, plug both the power and aux in cables in, strap the project box to a support in the console, and close it all up. Then, provided things go the way I want, it should just work.

After that I’ll start looking into changing the firmware on the head unit to read IPOD instead of AUX, and I’ll probably start seriously looking more into the Honda Music Link Device. I’ve got a growing desire to document as much about it as I can. Pinouts, high res board photos, and if the board doesn’t have too many layers, I may even try to work up a schematic. Or maybe even read out the ROM. We’ll see…

UPDATE: Oh, I forgot to add this photo of the bottle of acid, namely ferric cloride in water. I had it sitting in a pyrex measuring cup for two days because I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It can’t come in contact with metal at all, so I was having a hard time finding a container for it. While I was at GFS unsuccessfully looking through their cleaning products for such a contain, it came to me that I should just use a 1L wide-mouth Aquafina bottle to hold it. So I did. It’s working out nicely. Now I can save the solution to use a few months from now.