Adding bluetooth / playing mp3's on vintage ICE

[ian65]

The stereo in my 205 gti is one of these horrible cheapo Pioneers from Halfords....



The only good things about it are that it's bluetooth and will play music tracks from a USB stick..... but it looks, feels and sounds wibblepoo and looks completely out of place in a classic / retro car.

I'd like to put something a bit more 'period' in it and still have an old school Pioneer like this in the loft with a multichanger...











it was the dogs dangly bits back in the day with much better sound and power than the modern Pioneer currently in the car.


Does anyone know if there is anyway to hack the lead between the head unit and the multichanger ( or maybe the tape head) to allow me to play MP3's on it?

I don't want to go down the route of one of those dummy cassettes with an aux lead off it or a FM transmitter.... hoping for something a bit better.

[mouse]

www.amazon.com/ION-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Bluetooth/dp/B00I3YLHAC

Any good to you?

[g40jon]

If the old stereo has a line in, then you could just plug into that. There are loads of ready made modules for things like USD, SD and bluetooth that you can buy off of ebay for cheap. Then all you have to do is find somewhere to hide the module and interface it with the stereo.
If you don't have a line-in, you could open the stereo up, find the audio amp I/C, take the part number off of it, then look up the pin-out to find which pins are the audio input for the chip.
The other option would be to have the retro stereo, but for the usb/sd, bluetooth side of things totally bypass it and connect to an external amp. If you were planning on running an external amp for speakers and subs, this is what I would be inclined to do.

[Tepper]

I've successfully used a method like this in the past: Instructables

Basically you have a CD changer connected so that the head unit will select it, then you splice into the L/R audio channels (sent as an analogue signal from the changer to the HU on older units) but play a silent CD so that you can insert your own audio signal. You could wire it up to an aux jack, or to take it a step further wire it up to a bluetooth receiver like this. Pretty simple if you can find the pinout for the CD changer cable.