Hack - Kenwood Car Stereo Aux in Lead

I've been meaning to install an aux in socket in my car for what seems like years now. Well I've finally got around to doing it. I found this car stereo lying round the house and i opened it up to see what i was dealing with. The plan was to try and solder a 3.5mm jack socket onto the CD input. The result should be that when i play a silent CD the audio from my iPhone should be played.

Anyway, I've opened up the stereo and dismantled it to where I've just got the main circuit board, which you can see on the left, in my hands. The component which has the red box around is where the ribbon cable from the CD player connects. This is the CD input that i need to solder the cable to.







This is what it looks like from the bottom which is the side i needed to solder. Now i wasnt too sure on which pins were the audio L/R and GND. So, i did a search on google. I was typing in various things and not getting much look. That was until i typed in "J76-0048-32 kenwood" which is the long number written in white on the top of the circuit board. It brought up a pdf file with everything i needed in it. I located CN2 on the diagram and found that the pins i needed pins 16, 17 and 18.



Now the problem was that i didnt know which end to start counting. There was nothing indicating what pin 1 was. I checked the CD player though and where the ribbon connected was a similar component. This one however had a small 1 at one end and 24 at the other. So i followed the ribbon to find out which end to start counting on my input. Easy as really.

These were the three pins needed. The right hand one being pin 16.

16 - Right Channel
17 - GND
18 - Left Channel

So I've soldered the cable to the points put everything back together. I did make a mistake here feeding the cable out the side of the unit. I never considered what id do when i had to push it back into the cage. It was a tight fit and a bit of a struggle but i eventually squeezed it through. In hindsight, you should feed the cable out the back.






And here is the finished article. I've raised the socket off the plastic by using a black washer which i think makes it look smart. The sound quality is fantastic too. I get like a 1 second blip when the CD recycles back to track 1 but that only happens like every 80 minutes or so.