TAG | iphone
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Hacked an iPhone car kit for the Nexus One
0 Comments | Posted by id in howto, misc, mobile
Even while I had my iPhone as my primary mobile device, I had been interested in a car dock of some kind that didn’t involve a suction cup to my windshield or dashboard that could power the device and play audio into my car speakers. A coworker at Armor Games has a neat device, and forwarded a link to it at mwave.com: The Pixxo PF-C001 All-in-One Hands-Free Car Kit and Charger for iPhone or iPod w/ FM transmitter. It’s $15-$25 at mwave.com, $27 on eBay at the moment, and there are several similar items on Amazon for $15+. I went to Fry’s Electronics looking for something similar and only found iPhone-related gear. While the Pixxo device has an additional USB port on the side of the FM Transmitter, it would be inconvenient to have to use that to charge the primary device that’s being docked once my Nexus One arrived. What to do?
First off, my apologies for lack of photos. I thought about documenting it while I worked, but it was late last night. However, I do need to replace some of my handiwork with proper stuff like heat shrink and insulated wires to cut down on some radio interference.
First, I cut the iPod/iPhone adapter from the Pixxo unit, and saw that there were 8 wires (red, black, white, green, yellow, brown, purple and orange). Next, I cut a micro USB cable and saw that while it was well shielded on the outside, inside the foil insulator were only four wires (red, black, white and green). I twisted the matching wires together, taped it up enough that nothing was shorted, and tested it in the car, and my Nexus One started charging. w00t
Only thing left was to trim the wires back as far as I felt comfortable, shorten up the micro USB plug, and get everything taped up better. Which worked like a champ, except that I had no electrical tape, and I’m sure that as good as blue 3M Painter tape is, actual electrical tape or heat shrink would do a much better job.
Then, I shortened and spliced a stereo 3.5mm audio cable, as the one that shipped with the Pixxo unit was about two inches two short.
The net result:
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| (hosted at picasa) |
The folks over at BillShrink started a thread a little while back which they revisited when the Google Nexus One was released in early January 2010, and wrote up a nice comparison chart of the different phones’ capabilities, and costs. While they have tried to keep it up to date, lots of users have left comments on their site about price plans, requesting extra features on the chart, etc.
In a quest last night to find a cheaper alternative to giving AT&T $180 of my hard-earned cash every month for our two cell phones, I decided to take a page from BillShrink, and include some of the other phones that their users were requesting, along with additional phone features.
I’ll add more to the list as I have time, but this was my evening project last night. It’s ugly, it’s not written well, but it gets the point across. I’ll work on the overall look of it if enough people find it useful. Specs were gathered from several sites including the carriers, the phone manufacturers, a site called “pdadb” and a few items from the BillShrink chart.
http://iandouglas.com/cellphones.php
My chart will let you view specs from a single phone in the list, or multiple phones side-by-side so you can see their capabilities. I thought it would be interesting to list screen resolutions and DPI (calculated from the diagonal size), internal vs external storage, USB connector types, and more details about what the minimum/maximum carrier plans would include for the money you’ll pay for the phone over two years of ownership.
