TomTom Car Kit hack

[roddenshaw]

Hi all,

So, the TomTom iPhone car kit has finally been offered for pre-order. Hoorah!

At the moment I am using a Brodit pass-through dock in my car with a Griffin Autopilot for control of the iPod functions and Navigon for GPS navigation. Unfortunately the iPhone's internal GPS isn't really up to the task and so I would really like to buy the TomTom car kit to enhance the iPhone's GPS signal. That said, I also want to keep the functionality of the Griffin Autopilot.

I haven't played around with dock connector wiring before, so I'm a bit ignorant about how difficult/easy it is. In theory, however, I believe that I could crack open the TomTom car kit and wire the Griffin Autopilot into it (by connecting the wires from its integrated dock connector to that of the TomTom car kit instead). Does that sound feasible?

Any help is appreciated!

 

[jgalt]

Not likely to work, unfortunately. Each accessory probably uses the serial port lines in the dock connector to identify/authenticate itself and pass digital control messages, and there's no feasible way to multiplex these lines. You MIGHT get away with just hijacking the audio in/out lines (since they have their own dedicated pins), but that wouldn't include the control buttons.

If you do go down this path, good luck, and let us know how it turns out!