cassull

I recently got a 2005 TL with navigation. My old car had an aftermarket radio with bluetooth streaming and calls that really spoiled me, so this past weekend, my friend and I tore my dash apart and installed an AUX port and used that with a Kinivo BTC450 bluetooth receiver.

I did considerable research before I attempted this, and after talking to my friend, who is knowledgeable with electronics and general DIY, we basically completed the AUX portion using a $19 Radio Shack RCA switch ($7-$9 on amazon), some wire connectors (25 pack for $7) three different sets of RCA cables (at least one should have 3.5mm female end, the rest don't matter as they will get cut, about $3 each) and a ground loop isolator ($10 on amazon).

Grand total cost: $35 if you went for the cheap options beforehand.

A general overview of what we did:

1. Found the XM harness behind the head unit.
2. Located four wires on the harness: Left channel (+), left channel (-), right channel (+), right channel (-). I don't recall which was which color, but they should be red, white, green and black. Will post up a diagram from the service manual later.
3. Cut all 4 wires in half.
4. All cut wires will get spliced, so 8 splices total.
5. The wires that go to the trunk is the XM input cable and got a RCA cable spliced to that to represent the XM input.
6. The halves going to the harness (and head unit) is the output for the switch and got a RCA cable spliced into that to represent the output for the switch.
7. The RCA/3.5mm female was left intact to represent the AUX port.

We simply put the intact RCA/3.5mm cable through the opening of the top compartment just below the radio and connected the ground loop isolator to it. Tucked all of that into the top compartment. The other end (RCA end) of that, along with the other RCA cables, were wired to go from back of head unit to the glove box to connect to the switch.

Then we connected the Kinivo to the 3.5mm. Works great, no issues yet other than some intermittent skipping during songs that sounds bit rate-related and not due to the actual setup. That will be something between my phone and the bluetooth receiver (or possibly how my music is encoded, will see if I can track the issue down).

Using this setup, I am able to play and switch between AUX and XM sources. If you do some modification to the switch, you can completely bypass having to select a source on the switch and just have AUX and XM mix and play at the same time. I kind of regret doing this as we discovered there is no way to actually "turn off" the XM radio while in XM mode... If anyone has any insight on this, that'd be appreciated! Right now, I just don't have the XM RCA cable connected to the switch since I don't plan on ever listening to XM.

So that's a very brief and general description of my AUX install. No having to go into the trunk to mess with the XM radio or anything like that. Since the glove box was apparently designed for gnomes, keeping the owner's manual, quick start guide, etc. and the switch makes it pretty tight. Not a big deal, though.

Now for my question: since I'm in XM mode, I keep seeing the XM radio info on the climate control display. Is there any way to disable this?

Second question: if not, has anyone had any experience fiddling with the climate control display itself? I am anticipating that not many have done this, so I've purchased a used one and plan on hooking it up to a logic analyzer to figure out how the car talks to it. I plan on installing a Nexus 7 in the TL to replace the navigation, so I may lose the ability to manually adjust the clock, but I'd love to be able to still access it if need be.

Next project will involve figuring out the climate control display and modifying the navigation buttons to work with the tablet. I know another user has done this and reported some problems such as when headlights come on, so we plan on completely disconnecting the navigation buttons from the car and using it solely as tablet buttons to avoid that. While we had the car's interior guts out, I also took the opportunity to wire my dash cam's power cable underneath the center trim into the center console's power. No splicing or work there, just getting more cables out of sight. Will also be installing a back-up camera at some point to the Nexus 7, though I haven't had much luck tracking down a non-foreign capture card that will work on Android.

MonkeyTrucker

Would love to see pics of the install if you have any.
Question though, couldn't you have just used Honda part #08A31-0F1-000 to avoid the hassle of splicing?

I'm going old school with my setup if I can ever find the time, adding an aux and MP3 10-disc changer.