Hack16.Make a Very Cheap AUX-in


Hack 16. Make a Very Cheap AUX-in

If your budget is highly constrained or you're out in the wilderness, there's still a way to install an auxiliary input to your tape deck.

Let's say you're preparing for a long drive home from your grandparents' ranch in the country. Your car is oldit runs well and has surprisingly good A/C for its age, but the cassette player just started eating tapes and you don't want to drive a thousand miles without music.

You brought your laptop, and with amazing foresight you also brought your car power adapter for the laptop. You want to listen to the music stored on your laptop, but road noise makes its tinny speakers inaudible while you're driving. You'd like to output the audio through your car speakers, but how? The obvious solution, to use a tape adapter, isn't an option, because your grandparents live in a small town that stopped growing in the 1970sthere isn't a store where you can buy the tape adapter you need.

Still, if you're enterprising, and lucky, you may be able to hack your way out of this technological void. Here's how the hack might go.

First, you have to yank the deck out of your car to take it apart. You improvise some pliers, and pull the head unit out of your vehicle. Using a steak knife as a makeshift screwdriver, you open the unit, pulling off the top cover. You notice that there are two spots inside the tape deck where you see wires that might let in some audio. The actual wires running from the magnetic head that reads the tapes look like they could be spliced, and you have a pair of cheap headphones at hand, so you decide to sacrifice your headphones and connect them to the tape deck, using the twist-and-tape method of connection [Hack #4].

You cut the earpieces off your headphones to expose the wires. You then splice the red (right channel), white (left channel), and black or copper ground wires from your cheap headphones to the corresponding colors in the tape deck, as illustrated in Figure 2-13. You can usually identify the ground wire, even if it's not black, as a braided wire that surrounds the white and red headphone wires.

Figure 2-13. Audio input wires spliced into the tape deck


That done, you need to shove in one of your pre-eaten tapes so that the tape deck thinks there's a tape to amplify. Turn the volume on your laptop all the way down to the lowest squeak, plug in the headphone wires sticking out next to the tape, and voilàthe sound is amazingly passable. You get on the road and feel MacGyver-ish pride, knowing that you could probably survive on a post-apocalyptic earth with your techno-improvisational skill.



    Car PC Hacks
    Car PC Hacks
    ISBN: 0596008716
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 131

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