Just wondering about the tuner interface. Is this another serial port or some custom interface?
Mainly wondering because although I can probably live without a tuner (still wouldnt mind one tho) I do fancy the idea of the Sony stick remote control, but I dont want to lose my only serial port for this.
Is the part of the tuner which does this basically identical to the original design?
Can I hook up the interface to the tuner port myself?

Cheers

Dave

The tuner port is proprietary and seperate from the serial connector. On the tuner box itself is a mini headphone jack that the Sony stalk plugs into. If I recall correctly, if you don't have the tuner you could rig up the stalk to connect to the serial port.

Mainly wondering because although I can probably live without a tuner. I do fancy the idea of the Sony stick remote control, but I dont want to lose my only serial port for this.

On the tuner box itself is a mini headphone jack that the Sony stalk plugs into. If you don't have the tuner you could rig up the stalk to connect to the serial port.

So if I want to use both the serial port AND the Sony stick, I either get myself a tuner (sems unlikely now..) or lump it and lose my serial port?

Cheers

Dave

The tuner port is a serial port, but at TTL levels. In theory, you could make a stalk interface to plug into there and pretend to be enough of a tuner that the player would recognise it.

However, we're looking into how we can get more tuners made - probably by collecting pre-orders. Need to check this out futher though, so don't email us about it yet - we'll announce it if/when we know we can go ahead.

Hugo

The sony stick can be a real pain on some cars to install but there is a very nice remote from pioneer that fixes to the steering wheel and it can be run with hijack to do what ever you want.

It is the pioneer cds-r80 i think would have to go out in the snow to find out

Oh look the FAQ has been updated and there is a nice pic over at riocar FAQ bit

please do make more my roomate needs one

As Hugo wrote, tuner connects to second 'internal' TTL-level serial port. However, you can't simply plug Sony stalk into 'regular' serial port: it is just a bunch of resistors; a simple ADC in tuner module reads the resistance and sends measured value down the serial port in the format documented on riocar.org. In principle, you can cobble together a little interface with a PIC, UART etc and do that yourself (somebody already did that in pre-tuner days). However, Pioneer or Kenwood IR steering wheel remotes are really simpler solution.