First day on the new setup and it is working really well. There are a few bugs but its mostly me not being used to it and also the fact I haven't automated anything yet so I need to cast the screen every time. Will sort that out with tasker this weekend.
So the setup is a SPH-DA100 appradio2 which I bought from ebay for £100 notes. Very pleased as it was immaculate and also had brand new cables as the guy had upgraded to a new pioneer.
I had been using just the above with a 160GB ipod and it worked very well. Also using bluetooth for hands free phone use which also worked perfectly in minutes.
Even though the above worked fine I wanted more, and an excuse to play
So next task was to cast the mobile (Galaxy s5) screen to the headunit. This was reasonably easy and cheap.
I bought a Chromecast dongle from argos for £30 and fitted it. Luckily it came with a little HDMI extension lead or it would not have fit on the rear of the head unit properly. The other thing it requires is a micro USB feed for power. This is any old micro sub lead but the chromecast also comes with one so perfect. The standard end of this USB lead just connects to the standard pioneer apple cable USB port. This powers the device without the need to wire in a separate USB supply.
The chromecast will also need a wireless network to talk to your phone so you use your phone as a hotspot and job done. Just make sure to configure the initial chrome setup with the same wifi details of your phones hotspot, SSID and password.
So thats the audio and visual sorted.
Then we need the touch sync from the head unit back to the phone. This is done via bluetooth and appradio-unchained-reloaded.
What I found out eventually is there are a few different versions of the appradio unchained app. Some free and some not.
All appradio unchained apps need your android to be rooted. This isnt hard and takes a couple of minutes at most with a usb cable and free software. If you are just after root access then cf autoroute is an easy app to use and will keep your stock ROM. This means nothing changes on the phone, no data is lost and you then have root access.
The pain in the butt bit came with trying to set SE-linux to permissive once rooted. This is a particular problem with the S5 and as far as I could see there was no way of enabling this without a custom Kernel (much more phone hacking needed and probably a custom ROM) Earlier phones are much easier I believe and can be done with a free app once rooted.
unfortunately the free versions of appradio-unchained need this SELinux set to permissive.
However App-radio-unchaned-reloaded doesn't need this! It just works without it. Downside is its £19 but they its only £19.
So the process then is you have appradio server running in the backround on your phone. Once it connects to the car via bluetooth it automatically connects and turns your brightness down and turns to landscape. Then you enable your hotspot, the chrome automatically connects and you just hit cast screen. Thats it and you are done. Its also best to use nova launcher on your phone as its better in landscape than stock. Better all round to be honest and its free.
All of the above will be automated with tasker which is pretty easy to use. So eventually when I get in the car and the appradio sees the head unit it will activate my hotspot, connect to appradio, wait a few seconds then kick in and cast my screen to the phone and all done.
One other thing to note is power drain on your phone, you will definitely need to have it on charge. Even when on charge it only just keeps ahead of the battery drain keeping your charge about static. But considering today I was streaming iplayer radio, whilst using google navigation with satellite and I even took a hands free call at one point, it aint bad.
Next step is wireless charging unit under the cup holder so I can just drop my phone in and go. Completely cable free.
Any questions glad to help as I found it a pain in the butt to find info.
