awe-man… I was really hoping he had figured out and documented the protocol used to communicate directly to the zune port.

He could have just as easily polled the pins on the dock instead the IR transmitter.. it probably would have made for a much cleaner install (not to mention more useful to the Zune community) from the wired version of the remote I can tell you that there are dedicated pins specifically for remote functionality.

kudos for a zune hack though… MS got the portable media player right IMO, I only ever bought one because it was $80 on sale and I figured I could hack around with it, ended up liking it so much I just started using it and my ipod just collects dust.

Posted at 1:56 pm on Oct 8th, 2008 by twistedsymphony

Personally I like a player with support for real firmware. See rockbox.

I have a sansa e200r (v1) and with that firmware, it just kicks the ass off of anything else.

Posted at 2:41 pm on Oct 8th, 2008 by draeath

Lol. Zune.

Posted at 3:12 pm on Oct 8th, 2008 by Rufus

“Though he could possibly clean up the look of the LED sticking out of the console”

I doubt the LED can even be seen through the layers of dirt in that car. A look more consistent with the interior would have been to simply duct tape the Zune to the steering wheel.

Posted at 3:48 pm on Oct 8th, 2008 by pwrx

i received some free zunes from club.live, i didnt pay for them, but i actually enjoy using them, wished they synced with linux, but for free – i was a real bargain

Posted at 6:21 pm on Oct 8th, 2008 by fucter

Lol. Zune.

Lol. Beats Crapples.

Posted at 10:01 pm on Oct 8th, 2008 by pip

draeath, does the sansa and or the rockbox firmware support video and podcast management?

those are the two features I use most on my players, I have a SageTV box that automatically converts certain shows for use on the zune and then the zune software knows to sync them whenever I plug in.. same with my pod casts.

The two things I don’t like about the zune
-lack of support for Linux
-doesn’t interface with my car stereo like an iPod does.

Posted at 4:11 am on Oct 9th, 2008 by twistedsymphony

My zune came free from a MS contest. I like it, but unfortunately the zune homebrew community has all but died.

Posted at 7:10 am on Oct 9th, 2008 by eigenmeister

For those of you who don’t know, many cars these days use the LIN protocol to go from steering wheel controls to either the headunit or to a box that is connected to the cars internal CAN bus. If you try to find a single line that just pulses up and down like on his car, and fail, then you are going to be in for a much more “fun” hack.

You will need to get a micro that supports CAN and or LIN, and then set it up to read those busses. Then you can basically watch the busses to see when a button strike causes data on the bus to change.

(Your HAYNES or CHILTON’S guides will tell you which wires from the steering wheel are LIN or CAN)

Also, the Zune and Sansa et al, are MTP devices, go to MS and search for “MTP documentation” and that will give you the entire protocol for basically every USB media player that isn’t an iPod.

Posted at 10:15 am on Oct 12th, 2008 by derwiskinator