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Auris Bluetooth Adapter
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04-15-2013, 10:08 PM | #1 |
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Auris Bluetooth Adapter
This may be the holy grail for pre 2011 A2DP connectivity: http://theauris.com/products/arctic-white.
Supposedly this thing will allow not just A2DP but also AVRCP which should give steering wheel controls. Has anyone tried this? I did a search, but didn't see anything. If no one has tried it. I'll give it a shot and report back. |
04-15-2013, 10:40 PM | #2 |
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hmmm interested to hear about this as well. Looks like you can connect using ipod adapter and connect with bluetooth with any device. Has anyone tried this?
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04-16-2013, 06:36 AM | #3 |
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I'm a bit concerned it won't work, based on the compatibility page. I tried what it said here, connecting my iPhone with the Y cable. I can access all device features except iPod, where I get the screen described.
According to the page "systems that lock an iPod or iPhone’s screen and control mechanism use a digital audio interface,". I thought it was an analog input until more recent model years? All in all, I'm hoping someone else has tried this, but if not I'm still up for being the guinea pig. |
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04-16-2013, 09:54 AM | #4 |
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Anything that has to go through the aux
Anything that has to go through the aux.
is only as good as the aux. Which most of us no is not very good. |
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04-16-2013, 01:30 PM | #5 |
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It doesn't look like this interfaces with the steering wheel at all.
It's merely an APT-X receiver with vol / track buttons on the receiver itself (good for a belt or something). BUT - I'm actually in the prototype phase for an Android / iPhone steering wheel interface which controls via HID bluetooth. It hooks up via 4 wires - ignition 12v, ground, and the two audio control lines in the clock spring. I'll probably be selling them in the near future, as soon as I get the feature set refined (it does other things as well, such as latched outputs for DTC enable / disable and radar mute). Stay tuned... |
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04-16-2013, 04:07 PM | #6 | |
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Quote:
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04-16-2013, 09:34 PM | #7 | ||
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Anyway, short of adding a denison gateway or something, what other interface are you going to use? So it's whatever. Quote:
About the Auris: There are a couple aspects that sum up to whether it will "work" with the car. 1) will the phone pair and will you get audio 2) will that audio actually sound good. 3) will the steering wheel controls work. So let's go one by one: 1) The page linked suggests digital input accessories won't work, while analog input ones will. The Y cable on pre-combox BMWs is analog, so that much is fine. The box will WORK, at least in the sense you get audio. At this point, there's no difference between Y cable and a normal aux cable - think of the Y cable as an aux cable that plugs in via 30-pin and that bundles in some extra control circuitry. 2) With bluetooth devices, whether the pairing sounds good is basically completely pot luck. Every source/sink pair may be a different story. Not every sink device (of which this is one) - every pairing. An android with this thing may sound great, while an iPhone sounds like crap. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I will say that without any experimental evidence, my gut is that this will sound good with modern iPhone an androids. It supports the newest bluetooth standards, and it probably isn't cheap enough that they've spared expense on licensing high-performance codecs. But I'd love to hear real experiences. 3) The trickiest bit. AVRCP handles control, but the other piece of the puzzle is that the adapter has to talk iPod Accessory Protocol to the car. For example, while play/pause/skip/etc is simple over AVRCP, and even transferring contacts can be done over BT, all of that needs to be translated to iPod serial commands on the dock connector side. I don't know of any adapter that does that. I considered making one since I think it can be done and it'd be a great project, but I'm satisfied for now with a wired solution so it's basically the last thing on my to-do list. In the near future, I'd like to mount a nexus 7 to be sort of a permanent connected drive solution, so this may come up again. If I could make a full, standards-compliant bluetooth to iPod Accessory Protocol adapter, it'd be a really killer solution in these cars. But anyway, I think that it's likely if you buy this device that you're going to get a good quality device that works equivalently over aux or y-cable, which is to say doesn't give you controls but sounds good. Which brings me back to str8shot - is this what you have in mind? Or are you talking about something a bit different?
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04-17-2013, 09:10 AM | #8 | |
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The AVRCP potion of the Auris unit looks like it's for the buttons that are physically on the Auris receiver (ie, your phone is in your pocket, and you track up / down from the Auris clipped to your belt.) What I've designed is purely a steering wheel interface. It takes the steering wheel control output, and converts it to a useable signal (in this case a bluetooth command for your audio device). My car doesn't have bluetooth or the ipod interface built in, so when the stereo has the AUX selected, the track buttons don't do anything. Now they transmit track forward/backto my Galaxy S3 via bluetooth. It works with the iPhone as well, and any device that supports a bluetooth HID keyboard. I can write in long button hold detections, or multiple presses to do playlist forward back / artist forward back / album forward back, etc. From a technical stand point, it can be used to control any number of things. It's entirely limited to the programming I've written for it (so far I've got other things like radar mute, DTC cycle (on, DTC, full off), etc). I can do up to 10 controlled outputs (+12v signal) to control relays, in addition to the bluetooth output. |
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04-17-2013, 10:09 AM | #9 | |
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Are you tapping off the CAN bus to sniff presses? |
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04-17-2013, 01:26 PM | #10 | |
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The dock connector is an analog audio output with an analog dock control input. It doesn't look like it will work with the OEM BMW interface, since it's in the digital domain and locks the controls (theoretically, it could work if it cloned the ipod/iphone digital interface, but there's probably licensing issues at stake). I doubt it can pass along display info to the factory head unit or idrive like a plugged in apple product could as well. I designed my device for use without the factory ipod interface (which I don't have). All I have is an aux-in jack - and I wanted to be able to track forward/back, etc. without taking my hands off the wheel. I'm personally taking it one step further with an off the shelf APT-X bluetooth receiver permanently (probably switchable) plugged into the factory aux-in for full wireless capability. Sniffing the CAN network would require additional hardware, namely a MCP2515 CAN controller and MCP2551 CAN transceiver, which would add considerable complexity, additional parts and cost. I'm pulling raw signal right from the two clock spring outputs (I haven't figured out where the other end of the connection is, but it would also suffice) which is pre-CAN encapsulation. |
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04-17-2013, 01:34 PM | #11 |
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Also - almost overlooked this - but none of the Apple iDevices are APT-X compatible, so at most you'd get regular A2DP audio which has a tendency to suck ass.
I wouldn't use bluetooth for audio unless it was APT-X enabled. I know my Galaxy S3 supports it, but I'm not sure on other phone compatibility. |
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04-17-2013, 02:51 PM | #12 | ||||
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But anyway, that the display is locked out isn't really relevant. That's a function of using iAP (which is stupid, and as of iOS 6.1 no longer true, of course all the older devices implementing iAP still lock out. There's actually some reason for that, stemming from dumb specifics of iAP, like you hit pause in the app but it immediately starts playing again because iAP is stupid, but I digress). Whether your host implements iPod Out (different thing totally, and I don't understand it well, but that's the screen sharing thing) is irrelevant to that. Quote:
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The reason A2DP tends to suck is that the SBC codec is the only one REQUIRED by the A2DP spec, provided free of additional licensing charge, and it totally blows. If the devices in the pair don't BOTH support any ONE of a number of BETTER codecs, the pairing will sound crappy. The reason I suggest this will probably sound good with an iPhone is that I'd bet they didn't cheap out and omit support for AAC. If this supports AAC, iPhone supports AAC, and it should sound good. (Maybe not APT-X good, I've never heard a comparison. But a solid AAC pairing sounds great to me, anyway. As good as wired, especially since most of my music is AAC sourced anyway, via streaming programs or downloaded that way). But of course, if this thing only supports APT-X and NOT AAC, it'll sound great with some android devices and totally crappy with iPhones. I'd love for some brave soul to test
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04-17-2013, 03:34 PM | #13 | |||||
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There are enough buttons (and combination of buttons) to do everything I want, and that was the end goal of this project. I'll save reading the CAN bus for another day (have a gauge package in mind for things like boost, coolant temp, IAT on a OLED display). Quote:
I just tested it with my Galaxy to activate the Siri equivalent (S-Voice), and it works like a charm. Could be good for activating speaker phone I guess. Quote:
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It seems APT-X is the closet thing to BT CD quality audio. Is it on par, probably not. But it sounds like it's about as good as it's gonna get. |
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04-17-2013, 03:46 PM | #14 | |
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Since I have a tendancy to charge my phone while it's in the car, I may just do an external DAC via USB to the aux-in. When I had my iphone, I used a dock cable that had a USB plug for charging, as well as a 3.5mm for the line-out (which was a little cleaner, since it bypasses the iphones headphone amp). There's all sorts of stuff I can do - mist the intercooler via steering wheel, mute my radar (which pisses the gf off when it's at full tilt), disable DTC without holding the button in, activate NOOOOSSSS!, etc. Anything you can latch with a relay really. |
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04-17-2013, 03:57 PM | #15 | |
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I agree about plugging-in - I always need power anyway, so save for short trips where leaving the phone in my pocket and sacrificing nothing in the way of audio controls would be REALLY nice, It's not realllly worth my time, save for the sake of the project itself. Which I don't have time for :P. As far as BT goes - there's one device I know of, samsung makes a few ipod docks. There's one that's like $250, then one that's $400 and one that's $600. All offer bluetooth connection, which is what I was testing. It's funny, the cheapest one sounds like crap. And it sounds garbled and weak on the low end like is typical of a bad BT codec, so I'm sure it's that. The other two sounded fantastic. Really crystal clear. In that case, I'm sure the devices were using AAC, since that's the good codec available on the iPhone side. Of course, the problem is confirming that your BT device will support AAC as a codec, which is a total crapshoot.
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