Sans Panasonic iPod Integration

For a short time in my life I was commuting two hours three times a week, there and back! Four hours on the road each day, it was terrible. To sooth the pain I bought an after-market Panasonic cd/mp3 player. It was great for it's day, I could load up a CD full of mp3's and listen to my heart's content. It sure beat flipping through stations or bringing along ton's of CD's.

But the iPod eclipsed the mp3 CD player in a big way. I can put all my music on a little device that maintains all kinds of good metadata, playlists and more; it is convenient and a lot less bulky than traditional CD players. But my nice, shiny aftermarket deck didn't have an easy way to integrate the iPod. The deck contains Cd changer controls but there must be an active Panasonic changer before you can even select the inputs.

Then there was a glimmer in the distance, other people had the same problem and one cunning individual made an emulator that communicated with the deck to make it think a player was present. I excitedly order one of the emulators and a Belkin AutoKit to further my integration madness.

A week later it arrive and to my disappointment my Panasonic deck completely ignored the emulator and pretended that there was no CD changer. My heart sunk. So I dug out the old factory unit which was much more hackable due to the lack of surface mount circuit boards. I hacked it hijacking the tape leads and creating an audio in. Worked fairly well actually, but it wasn't as shiny as the aftermarket deck.

A year later I decided to renew my interest in making the Panasonic deck iPod compatible (on the cheap of course). Kristoffer agreed to try out a new version of the unit to see if the slower clock speed would make a different.

Same excitement, same let down.

I really appreciate Kristoffer's kindness in letting me try out a newer unit, and letting me return both units back to him.

So now I am back to the old delco, I guess I might as well disable the tape motors to keep the signal from cutting out every 45 minutes ;-)