I recently bought a 2001 Chevy S10 extended cab since
my car got stolen last December. It currently has a stock radio/cd player. It also has a tape deck that is separate from the actual cd/radio unit that is part of the middle floor-console. What I am looking to do is build a custom audio player that can play mp3's (and other formats) from a usb drive. Whats more is I want to be able to park my truck near my apartment and transfer mp3s to it wirelessly using wifi. In addition to this I want the entire setup to look completely stock, or as close to stock as possible. I want it to look stock so assholes looking in my truck wont see anything that they might want to steal (thus they dont break in and steal shit).
Seems like a lot to ask for, but I think I have pretty much everything figured out...
The plan:
I bought an Asus WL-500G Premium wireless router. It has two usb ports. I installed OpenWRT on the router, plugged in a usb flash drive and a usb sound card. All the software is working and currently plays all music from the usb drive at boot (takes about 20 seconds for playback to begin from power-up). I also have samba installed on it so I can take my laptop, connect to it wirelessly and transfer music to the usb drive. I intend on gutting out the stock tape-deck and replace it with the motherboard of the wireless router along with the peripherals.
I am assuming that there is some sort of wiring harness that the tape deck uses to connect to the rest of the radio. I havent had the time to pull out the tape deck yet and see if this is true and what kind of harness there is behind there. I am assuming there are at least the following in the harness: Power (+12V), Ground, Audio-L, Audio-R, and at least one signal cable for prev/next. I really want to be able to control prev/next using the radio's buttons, but I wont lose sleep if I have to put extra buttons somewhere. I then want nothing but a usb port (to connect a flash drive to), wireless antenna port (to allow the antenna to be disconnected) and an ethernet port to be accessible/shown, everything else looking completely stock.
I spec'd out some 5V/1A voltage regulators to power the bitch and am thinking I would be able to directly plug the audio signals from the router to the inputs of the radio. I may need some other circuitry to provide the correct signals to the rest of the pins on the harness, I'm not worried about making something for that (I am a senior graduating in degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science come May). So the basics (power, and audio) are pretty much thought of, just not sure if I would be able to
Does anybody have experience in connecting custom audio to car audio? I already have planned on taking a multimeter to the pins of the tape deck when its playing (gotta find a tape first) to get an idea of what I should be aiming for.
I plan on working on the truck-integration as soon as I can, but class, work, and lack of a garage makes it hard to work on it. Any help on this part would help.
Pictures to come... (Just gotta find my camera first)
