We’ve seen all sorts of ways to implement Bluetooth connectivity on your car stereo, but [Tony’s] hack may be the cheapest and easiest way yet. The above-featured Bluetooth receiver is a measly $15 over at Amazon (actually $7.50 today—it’s Cyber Monday after all) and couldn’t be any more hacker-friendly. It features a headphone jack for plugging into your car’s AUX port and is powered via USB.
[Tony] didn’t want the receiver clunking around in the console, though, so he cracked it open and went about integrating it directly by soldering the appropriate USB pins to 5V and GND on the stereo. There was just one catch: the stereo had no AUX input. [Tony] needed to rig his own, so he hijacked the CD player’s left and right audio channels (read about it in his other post), which he then soldered to the audio output of the Bluetooth device. After shoving all the bits back into the dashboard, [Tony] just needed to fool his stereo into thinking a CD was playing, so he burned a disc with 10 hours of silence to spin while the tunes play wirelessly. Nice!
Its $1.50 here – http://www.pingpongmegastore.com/p/Table-Tennis-Tables/B00HT07QXI/detail/Generic-USB-Bluetooth-Music-Audio-Stereo-Receiver-Fit-for-Car-AUX-in-Home-Mp3-Speaker-Iphone.php
this one does not look like it supports apt-x. and you DO want that codec, since its the only one for BT that has any semblance of decent audio quality.
description on amazon item linked says: “FINIGO NFC-enabled Bluetooth 4.0 Audio Receiver with APTX Technology for Home Stereo for car”. still, airplay/dnla would be better/higher quality.
Not that the quality difference is going to be noticeable in an automotive environment…
this one DOES support apt-x:
http://www.amazon.com/Avantree-Wireless-Bluetooth-Receiver-Transmitter/dp/B0085HOM4K
I have it and while it mostly works, pairing it is a huge PITA. if you have a phone with a display, fine, life is good. but if you are trying to pair 2 dongles and neither have a display, knowing when they are paired is nearly impossible. I did it once with 2 such dongles (sender and receiver) with intention to use it in the car, but its very ‘blind’ and not user friendly. the receive mode of that avantree unit works ok but in transmit mode, it times out too easily (on song silence) and then you have to power it on again, manually.
would be nice to have dongles like this but with pairing indicators. have not found such a thing.
blackberry music gateway will solve that for you. pairs to any phone or device, is no bigger than that, powered by usb. supports two devices at once and is nfc enable with the codec you are seeking.
I have one of those Blackberry gizmos, the one with the touch sensitive top. Been thinking of making a nice stereo bluetooth speaker box with it set flush with the top or front.
The last bluetooth adapter I bought was a nightmare to connect every time: it would stay paired with my phone, but would time out and go to deep sleep if I forgot to enable BT on my phone. Does the BlackBerry constantly seek your phone, or do you have to choose it from the phone?
i think the sabrent airplay model is the one to get. creates its own wifi network (or can join existing wifi network using updated firmware) that anyone in the car can join and airplay/dlna music to.
and because its airplay, there is no loss in quality from the original source audio, unlike bluetooth. saw um for $20 over the holiday.
http://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Receiver-Supports-Portable-WF-RADU/dp/B00L26YDA4
Surely if it’s wifi your phone will be trying to use it for data? So no waze/gmaps/Spotify? Also can’t take calls over it.
sure you can, you just need to add a default route for your outbound/WAN traffic. networking how does it work!?
who supports ‘airplay’ ? do a lot of phones come with that, now?
that’s the problem with apt-x. not a lot of phones have that, yet.
iOS only. Dlna is cross platform though.
Thank god ‘AirAudio’ exists for Android.
You say it, AirAudio supports them all :)
apt-x can be hacked in into CM firmware
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2531440
i bought one of the pictured audio receiver from eBay for just a couple of bucks, but mine sounds like sh1t.
there’s absolutely no bass in the audio signal. no matter what i connect it to, even a pair of decent bookshelf speakers hooked on to a 20W amp chirp like a mobile phone in a can.
not to mention the 2-3m effective range.
that’s why i rather built a “shairport express” from a tplink mr3020 and an usb sound card. takes 20-30 seconds to boot, but the sound quality is quite nice, even if i use just a junk $0.99 usb sound card.
basically the AR9331 in the router has I2s connectivity, but those pins are not accessible.
I had the range problem with mine, and blame it on the short internal antenna. If my basic radio skills haven’t failed me, a better antenna length is near 2.5 inches. I soldered a piece of wire of that length to the on board antenna of several of these, and have seen reliable ranges of between 5 and 20 meters, even though walls now. Not sure if it increased the audio quality but I suspect it’s a bit better now.
While this counts as a great hack, it provides me the opportunity to rant orthogonally :-)
Where are the cheap bluetooth-audio-receiver-fm-transmitter bridge devices? If you look around online, you can find a few, but I have only seen one in a store in Canada – and it was $100 (ie not cheap).
Lots of bluetooth receivers that plug into stereos with audio in. Lots of FM transmitters that plug into your mp3 player. Marrying them seems to make perfect sense.
Unfortunately, I think there might not be enough of a market for them to warrant mass production. FM transmitters are typically used in cars that are new enough not to have a tape deck, but old enough not to have an aux in jack, so probably three or four model years.
However, they seem like they’d be simple enough devices. Maybe it’s an untapped market for some enterprising tinkerer to explore.
I’ve done that, cheap FM transmitter that plugs into an MP3 player headphone jack, cheap Bluetooth receiver that you plug headphones into, less than $20 Canadian and I can play my phone over my car radio via Blufum (or whatever the hell you call a Bluetooth to FM adapter setup.)
You can any of a large variety from your any chinese crapvendor for under $20. Search string ‘bluetooth fm transmitter’ e.g.
http://www.dx.com/s/bluetooth+fm+transmitter
I too hijacked my CD input, but instead of burning a blank disc, I discovered I can take any CD and turn it upside down.
But, wouldn’t it play satanic messages then?
(c;
doing so may prematurely wear out the laser as it attempts to read/focus on a track.
neat trick, if you care about the laser assembly you may have concern that the laser will wear prematurely as the laser has to continuously re-focus in order to find the track it will never find on the top of the disc..
Buck cheaper today, 6.50
I bought this one and was very disappointed. The one I got cut out all low end and was only good for podcasts with talking… I am not sure if it was a defect.
I am planing to implement BT on my car, the audio source (phone, tablet etc) can be controlled by steerinrg wheel (stalk) controller in my project.