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I’ll admit it, I’m a Volvo driver. I don’t care who knows it, I love my S80. Recently I decided that I could really do with a decent stash of music for my long trips that I’m making every couple of weeks between the UK and Netherlands. For the longest time I’d been struggling with getting CD’s out of their cases for the single cd, or fighting with the CD Changer jumping at the slightest bump. I finally caved in and purchased an IMIV unit so I could connect an iPod and control it from the stock Volvo head unit. So far it’s working really well, although I seem to have the knack of putting it into firmware upgrade mode. I’m going to email the developers to see if it’s possible to disable the headunit trigger of an update. I’m pretty sure I’m never going to upgrade while in motion which means I’ll have access to the physical unit to switch to update mode. The interesting thing about the IMIV is that you can get it to pretend to be various different devices, mine presents itself to the car as a Mini-disc changer and TV input. This means that I can still have the CD Changer working just by using the IMIV pass through port.

Itunes sucks as it is, but since I don’t use Macs or Windows it means I can’t use that for my music. It’s a bit of a blessing in reality. There are a number of applications for Linux which allow you to manage your iPod, in the end I went with the simple to use, opensource gnupod Perl scripts. The best part of these scripts is the ability to use regex for generating the playlists, something that’s very important with the IMIV.

The IMIV will only work with MELBUS (Mitsubishi Electronics Bus) based Volvo systems, newer Volvos (XC90, new model S40/V50/C70 and S80) use MOST which is apparently fiber optic based.

Tagged with: hardware • linux • opensource • software
January 19, 2008 20:47

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