My solution to Bluetooth in a '05LGT

Hi all,

As you all should know the integration of the head unit and the climate control makes adding BT phone and audio a royal PITA. There are a few options available. I thought I would share my solution.

Basically it composes pairing the Leptronix Aux-in board to a [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Parrot-MKi9000-Advanced-Bluetooth-hands-free/dp/B001L10OF8]Parrot Mki9000[/ame]. I chose the 9000 as it was the basic of the product line and only uses a wireless controller for an interface. I use my phone for display and did not need the Parrot screens. The Parrot, along with hands-free phone, includes audio sources from BT, ipod, line-in, and USB. It also has other nice features like separate memory for phone and audio volume levels, dual phone mode, voice commands, etc. My goal was to us the stock HU "call" mode for all the hands free communication (will only come through front speakers and be equallized for voice) and the Leptronix aux-in for all the audio input (using all four speakers and normal eq). This proved a bit tricky in wiring and setup and certainly not straight forward. The parrot manual was mostly useless. I had to reference several sources to figure this out. I am happy to report that it all worked out in the end.

WIRING:

1) Install the Leptronix board. Install instructions HERE. I strongly recommend testing the leptronix installation at this point. Plug in the HU and an Aux-in source to make sure you have audio, the auto source sensing works, and the manual source switch also works.

2) Use a 1/8" male to 1/8" female headphone extension wire to plug into the Leptronix board. This way you have the aux-in plug OUTSIDE your HU which makes wiring so much easier. EXAMPLE

3) Wire ground, constant and ignition from the Parrot harness into the main sube harness. I have the subaru add-on sub, so I simply pulled out the sub harness and wired it in there. Stock connector pinout Note: The factory sub harness does not adhere to the standard wire colors

4) Audio wiring: The Parrot has line out wires, for some reason chose to provide them as four loose wires (+/- Left and +/- Right). You will need to wire these up to plug into the 1/8" aux-in jack. What I did was find a spare cable, cut the end and soldered it to the parrot harness. The only trick is to match left and right. On the plug, the tip is left, center is right and base is ground. So when you have the wires stripped, use an ohmmeter to see which is which. On mine, black was left, red was right and white was ground, but there doesn't seem to be a consistent scheme. For the grounds, you simply wire both left/right from the parrot together.

5) Phone wiring: There are three wires to worry about getting to the HU; Phone-in +/- and mute. On the stock HU these wires are routed to connector i85. SVXdc has this post that I used as reference. The bad news is that the three wires are not present in the factory connector. There are a couple of options; you can de-pin unused wires, cut the wires, wire to the parrot harness and re-pin them in the proper spots. I do not use steering wheel controls or the optional (outback only?) powered subwoofer so the Sat and Subwoofer wires were good candidates. SVXdc (aka David Carter) offered to provide pinned wires to be soldered in and inserted into the connector. I was going with the first option when I noticed that the pins were the same as what is used on the early ECU plugs which I just happen to have plenty of (for reference, but also requires a crimper like this one). Now, to insert/remove any pins from the connector, the white blocker part of the housing needs to be removed. There are six latches around the edge that needs to be pried apart. This was a pain and took a bit. Now for the wiring, the yellow mute wire from the parrot harness goes straight to i-85 pin2. For the phone input, you need to take the powered left speaker output from the parrot harness (white(+)/white-black(-) on the "to speakers" part of the harness) and stick them in i-85 pins1 (white(+)) and i-85 pin5 (white-black (-). Don't be a dummy like me and pay attention to how you are running the new wires. I had half the harness behind the dash and half outside the dash. That was a good 15 minutes of re-pinning and rerouting wires.

6) Finish up with running the microphone wires and the audio-in harness. I mounted my mic right behind the parking light switch on the steering wheel column. I ran the audio-in harness along the tunnel and for now just kind of pokes out the bottom between the seat and the center tunnel. I don't plan to use this much, so for now it isn't important to me.

7) Plug everything back in, do a test and reinstall everything.

SETUP:

1) I would recommend updating the Parrot's firmware first thing. Directions HERE.

2) The way it works by default is that when either phone or audio source is used, the Parrot will switch the HU to "Call" mode via the mute line. You do not want your BT audio running through the "Call" mode because, as previously mentioned will sound like crap. The trick is, to set the Parrot to "disable mute on audio" which basically means, don't trigger the mute line when sending audio so that the HU stays in normal mode and the audio will be delivered via the aux-in line and by extension the Leptronix board. This was the most frustrating part of the whole deal for me. The Parrot manual describes how to do this (hold down << and >> at the same time) but no matter how I tried would not work. Some online references said to do it between 25 and 30 seconds after turning the ign on. I am not sure what exactly I did, but eventually it worked. I think it had a lot to do with updating the firmware, which is why I recommend doing this first step.

3) Other setup choices are optional so go through the menu and choose what you like.

I think that is it. I am happy with the audio and call quality and so far the people on the other end of the HF calls report that I am perfectly understandable which is all I was hoping for. The BT audio sounds great (well as great as the stock setup will allow) and the little remote works well. The only thing I have found that I would like to improve is the leptronix switching. It works perfect for how it is designed. It switches right to the aux-in when it detects sound. There is a 25 second delay for when it switches back to when the aux-in is turned off. I understand why that is there so that it won't flip back and forth during quiet times in a song. I end up manually toggling it back to radio mode most of the time. I think the solution I am going to look at down the road is making use of the spare 4th input to the stock source button and to toggle the inputs on the leptronx. I think that would be perfect. The only other minor complaint I have is that there is a fraction of a second delay between the switching of the HU to phone mode, so that you typically miss the part or all of the first word spoken by parrot. Not a big deal, but I am going to ask Parrot if they can add an option for a delay to the voice command.

That is all I can think of. I hope this was helpful to someone. Let me know if you have any questions.

-Rob

I was asked through PM to clarify a few things. First was info on how the volume controls work. Basically there are three distinct, separate volumes; Radio/CD, BT audio, phone. Here is how they work;

1) Radio/CD: This is the basic HU volume. simple enough

2) BT audio (or Ipod/Aux-in/USB input audio from the Parrot unit): This ends up being the current HU volume +/- the last volume used from the Parrot. The latter remembers the volume even through power cycles.

3) Phone: The HU when in "Call" mode defaults to audio level '17' no matter what the music volume is currently set at or what the last call volume was. The Parrot unit also has its own phone volume that it adds or subtracts from the base HU call value. It remembers the last value just like it does on the audio side.

I also should add that the unused phone input is only valid for 2005-2006 HUs with auto A/C controls in US and Canadian cars (HU models P-201UE, P-201UH, P-203UE, and P-203UH).

-Rob