Coach Thrasher

Sony Unilink to iPod Hookup

It's regatta season and that means long hours on the road driving to events. It's been frustrating ever since I started using an iPod to listen to audio books because I have no way of hooking my iPod up to my Sony WXC570 car stereo.

After researching available solutions to getting audio from my video iPod into my car stereo, I finally found the "easy" solution: use a Sony XA-300 Unilink based audio selector to choose the AUX audio input. With this gadget, I can hook the iPod up to that AUX input. This has several drawbacks though: there's no hookup to charge the iPod, and I need three wires for this system: RCA cables and Unilink cable that run from the head unit to the XA-300, and a mini-stereo plug to RCA cable to connect the iPod to the XA-300.... and if I want to keep the iPod charged, I'd need an additional wire run from a cigarette plug to the iPod. That's a pain, but the FM-radio based iPod solutions (iTrip) completely failed to do the job.

I ran across something really cool WRT the Sony Unilink setup though: there's a SF project called GNUnilink that has hacked the interface with a PIC microcontroller. I've got all the hardware to program PICs, and I've got a few chips laying around, so if I'm going to go through the trouble of taking my dash apart, I might as well try to add a PC-serial control as well. The hardware setup is quite simple, check it out:

There's also a discussion forum regarding Unilink hacking here: Unilink Discussion Board. Note: this is a hacker site, and not approved by Sony. Be careful not to kill your head unit!

Updated: The finished XA-300 to iPod photos are up.

Posted at 09:23AM Apr 10, 2006 by jason in Hardware  |  Comments[3]