It says that a value of 2 will send the song / artist / genre / etc. on the serial port.

It doesn't mean to say 2.

The author of that document used the HTML "numbered list" tag to put the value in that table instead of just typing the numbers into the text. So the HTML is rendering differently on some browsers. On some browsers, the table properly shows "0." and "1.", on other browsers, it shows "1." and "2.".

The table, correctly rendered, should say that a value of 1 will send the song/artist/genre to the serial port, not 2.

I would correct the table, but that section of riocar.org isn't my monkey.


What format does it do this in.

RS-232 serial ASCII terminal output. To see it in action, configure the notify=1 entry, fully reboot the player, then watch it on your PC's serial port as described here in the FAQ.

would I be able to redirect that to a script to reformat the pulses so they are compatible with the Saab interface?

The real question is: what the Saab interface is. We don't know about the Saab interface. If we're lucky, it might happen to be RS-232 serial ASCII already. Then you might be able to do it in software somehow.

But if the Saab doesn't speak standard serial, then you will be stuck reverse-engineering it and making a ASCII-to-Saab hardware interface.