Earlier this week I recieved a PAC SWI-3 steering wheel interface that I'm sure many of you are aware of. Basically what it does is sample a given IR remote and then play that sample based on steering wheel button pushes. The "-3" that I have is for the switched resistance type steering wheel buttons. Well, I installed the thing and it worked marginally well for single event functions like track advance, but for continuous output like a vol +/- it was laughably slow. I'm not sure if the duty cycle of the sample rate is what was slowing it down or if there was a problem with the kenwood transmit frequency.

I believe it was the sample rate... so I went about building my own that I could interface directly to the supplied kenwood remote and my Honda steering wheel. I built a small card that would essentially "push the buttons" of the kenwood remote via a standard analog switch (4066). The resistor switches in the wheel provide variable gain to an op amp circuit (741) which is then decoded by way of a bank of six comparators (339). It's an extremely simple design, and one which you can add functions too.. I added a single button to serve as a bank select to up my wheel functions from 3 to 6.

I've attached a pic of the board for grins (please note the sloppy addition of some pull-ups on the ctrl outputs, oops), but I have yet to wire it to the kenwood (I'm deciding on the best functions to have on the wheel). If anyone is interested, I can provide them with schematics or other helpfull hints as how to duplicate the setup.

I'll post an update when I'm done testing and have it installed...

Thanks

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