All of my music now is played from a Flash drive via a USB adaptor plugged into my Pioneer DEH-P9400MP (and as you can now get 2Gb for just £7.99 that will hold 500 songs that has to be good
),but rather crudely installed (I use the term “installed” very loosely),as the female end of the USB cable was just left floating about in the cubby hole underneath the headunit,so following on from an idea I got from a link posted up by Neil (Old no7),as a non smoker it was time to put the always redundant cigarette lighter socket to good use again.
The whole assembly is held in by one Torx T20 screw under the ashtray itself,undo this and push it forward a litltle bit,and then lift up and slide backwards to get it out,when out you should see this lot.
Now comes the trickiest part of the job,separating the various bits.it’s difficult to describe but it involves several small flat bladed screwdrivers,and releasing the various locking lugs at the same time,the two in the sides of the metal sleeve,and some in the orange plastic part through slots in the metal sleeve.
Grip the sleeve CAREFULLY in a vice and drill out the centre rivet,this won’t take long as it’s only brass which is very soft.
This is what you’ll be left with once you’ve separated all the parts.
This needs to filed out to the size of the USB connector using a flat bladed file.I found that a 15mm Snap On long reach socket was a perfect fit inside so that I could do the vice up nice and tight to hold it properly while filing it.
It needs to as snug a fit as possible to hold it steady while the glue sets,I was lucky as the Pioneer USB lead has a nice soft rubber case on it,so file a VERY LITTLE bit at a time and keep trying the plug until it needs some effort to push it in.
After keying both the surfaces with some coarse emery cloth,hot glue the two together with the Flash drive in place to make sure it all lines up properly,and then when you realise it now won’t go back in the orange plastic bit because you’ve put too much glue on,take a Stanley knife and take most of it off again.
This is what it should look like when you’re finished,I had about 5-6mm of it protruding into the bottom of the sleeve.
As I left my soldering iron at work,I wrapped a piece of wire around the earth contact on the side of the bulb holder (the black in the photo),and cut down a small spade crimp to connect to the other side (grey/red wire in photo),and then re-assemble in the order of :- orange plastic sleeve,metal sleeve and finally the bulb holder.Put some more hot glue around the back of the USB connector,and a couple of male spade crimps on the ends of the wires that can now be pushed into the connector that used to be plugged into the lighter socket,in my case black went to brown,and grey/red went to grey/blue.
Put the whole lot back into its rightful home,put the T20 screw back in again,push the old Nokia car kit extension speaker that is now plugged into your portable sat. nav. back into where the ashtray used to be,push your Flash drive into its new home,and look really smug as you did all this in less than an hour.
The good thing about this type of system is that I can plug any type of USB memory storage device into it (card readers to play music from Compact Flash,SD,or MMC cards),and also ANY MP3 player that has a USB connection,so not just i-Pods but also Zen,Archos or even just portable HDDs or anything else you can think of without any risk of the unwanted noise that most of the other portable music player adaptors will add to the sound.
Chris.