iPhone Dock for Pathfinder!
I’m so happy about finishing this little project. Since getting my iPhone, I’ve had a real problem when listening to it in the car. A long time ago, like more then five years, I spent a bunch of money on the first car stereo system to come out which ‘talked’ to your iPod. Basically you jack your iPod into this cable and you can control it from the car stereo. (Plus the audio is routed through the car system) I loved this setup, it works great and I’d go crazy without.
So there is this small problem, when I had it installed I figured the best place was for the iPod to go in the console between the seats. So you’d get in, connect the iPod and close the lid of the console. This works great until your iPod is your phone and you need to answer the phone or make calls.
The bluetooth headset more or less takes care of the answer the phone part. You can answer the phone with the little button on the headset, but there is no way to make calls. So I started the quest to find a way to bring the iPhone out of the console, but not give up the connection to the stereo.
After some searching of the Internet tubes, I found this place which sells docks for the car and custom mounting brackets. I had to hold off install the dock until I had a chance to re-route the iPod cable from the console to where the dock was going to be mounted. So Saturday I spent most of the afternoon disassembling the car, so I could move the cable a couple feet. Once the cable was moved, mounting the dock took all of 30 minutes and presto, I had a dock for my iPhone in the truck.
Couple things still need to be done, the cable for the dock is still hanging out in the open. This will get caught on something eventually and pulled out of the dock. I couldn’t find any zip tie mounts today, but I’ll order some online tomorrow and fix that problem. The other problem is the size of the dock cable. Since the iPhone uses 5volts to charge and my system was wired for the old 12volts iPods, I have this big adapter between the cable and the dock. It is really nice to have the iPhone charged when in the car, so I’m going to deal with how stupid it looks.
My Pathfinder is starting to look like the inside of the Space Shuttle with all the screens and gadgets. But I actually sort of like that. :-)