Monday, July 28, 2008

Suzuki Grand Vitara, SX4 : How to connect your iPod / MP3 Player

(Auxiliary Port)

I bought a GV recently and was quite surprised to see the audio system not having an

external line in connection. Googled and found out this site. Thanks to Griff, Steeleus and

others, now we have a set of instructions on how to do this. This blog puts all that

knowledge into a howto. This will work for your Suzuki Grand Vitara / Suzuki SX4 (2007

and later models) and others with the same Clarion head unit. Here is how the head unit

looks.

Clarion Audio, above the AC Controls

We need to carefully remove the head unit. For this you need to remove the shiny molded

trim first. This is probably the trickiest part.

Take a small screw driver, wrap it in 2 to 4 layers of polythene sheet to avoid

damaging the fittings.

Insert the screw driver carefully under the bottom of the shiny plastic trim ; push

the screwdriver outwards gently. The molding will open - see pics below.

Depungolification...

Covered screwdriver under the trim corner

Gently push out the Silver trim

Release the interlocks one by one, if necessary, using the screwdriver wrapped in

polythene.

One trim is off

Follow the same procedure and remove the other trim too.

Both the trims are off now

Remove the top 5 screws on either side. You can leave the bottom two. Now

carefully pull out the audio and AC controls panels. You will need to disconnect the

antenna cable, the head unit connector, and the 2 AC unit connectors. The antenna

cable is a single wire, you can yank it out. All the others have a release tab in the

middle of the connector, press it down and pull out the connector. Do not pull the

wires, pull the connector while pressing down the release tab in the middle.

4 Connectors removed from Panel

Press the release tab and pull to detach

Head Unit

Connectors behind the head unit

The white connector above is the one we are interested in. The pin-out for the

same is below.

Suzuki Vitara / SX4 Aux Connector Pin Out

You need a connector to get to these pins. After hunting around, I found out that

the connector that mates a PC mother board USB port header pins to the USB port

itself on the PC Cabinet, will fit the bill. More about this connector here. (See the

note on connector at the end of the howto, for an alternate connector). Your

friendly neighborhood PC repair person will be able to give you one. You will also

need to get a 1k to 2k Resistor from the electronics store, if you don't have one in

your electronics junk box. See the connectors (2 rows) below.

USB cable used to connect to the head unit

You now need to get a stereo jack and cable like the one below and cut off one end

of the cable. This coule be an RCA to audio jacks that you can find in any audio

store, cut out the RCA end. We will now need to insert the cut end of the cable

through the Sun Glass compartment below the 4H-4L Lock knob. See the figure

below; we are going to thread the cable through this (The Jack is in the Box lable

below) area, so that we dont have to drill holes to bring up the cable.

Sun Glass Compartment

Open your sun glass compartment by pressing that button below the label.

There is a ready made slot behind this compartment. You can feel it if you probe

for it in the open compartment. If you light up and look carefully you can see it too.

See the picture below.

Cable inserted thru the slot

Insert the cut end of the cable through this slot. You are now ready to wire up the

unit.

Connect the Resistor between Trigger 1 and Trigger 2, Connect the Audio Jack to

the Left Right and Signal Ground Wires, solder the connections if you can. Insulate

them - use a scotch tape; and tape the resistor to the back of the unit. You can cut

off the unused wires.

Connect the antenna back first! Many of us have had to open up the unit after

complete assembly, because the radio stopped working - forgot to connect up

the antenna connector. Now connect back the audio unit (one connector more),

AC Power and AC Controls cables. Switch on your car ignition and press the CD

button on the Audio head unit. You should see the result of your hard work now (see

pic below)!

AUX Success!

Connect your MP3 player line out to the stero jack, turn up the volume and ensure

both Left and Right channels are fine. Also tune into your favourite radio station to

ensure Radio is functional. Start the Car and check your AC unit is functioning

normally. If the AC Control or Power is not properly connected, you will see a

"System Check" message on the display.

Once you are sure all systems are fine, switch off the car, and screw back the panel

properly. Put the Silver Trims, starting from the top and working your way back

down to the bottom edge.

Everything is back to normal with the Added AUX!

Note on the Audio Connector:

Instead of the Digital USB connector above, you can use a good low noise analog connector

if you are willing to do little fine work. This is the connector where the 3rd pin is blank.

This is the one used to connect the CD Audio from a CD driver to the motherboard audio

header. You will have to cut out the blank 3rd row and insert the 4th row on to the Trigger

2 Pin on one of the connectors.

Posted by Onglipo at 3:33 AM 0 comments

Labels: Audio Line In, Aux Input, Grand Vitara, iPod, MP3, Suzuki, Swift, SX4

Monday, July 21, 2008

Auto wake-up and shutdown for the OpenSolaris ZFS NAS

Now that you have set up your NAS, here are some tips to save power and switch it on/off

remotely.

First, lets change the default wait time for boot that grub takes. From the console, run:

dp@zfs.local:~# bootadm list-menu

The location for the active GRUB menu is: /boot/grub/menu.lst

bootadm: no matching entry found

dp@zfs.local:~# cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

# For zfs root, menu.lst has moved to /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst.

Interesting. We can use bootadm again to change the timeout or directly edit

/rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst. I did the second. Change the timeout parameter (default 30

seconds) to whatever you prefer - I set it to 5 seconds, 0 will boot without querying. First

three lines of my file are:

splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz