As someone who uses their iPhone for Navigation, the factory location of the USB and AUX means I have to run wires from the windshield down across the center console, and its a mess.

I don't suppose anyone has relocated the pair? I'd love to have them aft of the defrost vents, but maybe I'm weird.

 

It's not especially hard to fish up cabling from behind the knee bolster to come out alongside the steering wheel. That's what I did for my iPhone mount, and it works nicely. One of these days I'll work up the gumption to remove the bolster and vertical bit and hide it away entirely, but for now it's pretty nicely hidden. Now, if you're using the actual MINI iPhone cable, you might have to buy a iphone docking cable extension like http://www.cablejive.com/extendercable.html but that'll get your iPhone up out of the center storage area nicely. I don't know if the 2' extension would be enough or if you'd need the 6' extension, though.

 

Do you happen to have a picture or two of how your running the cable? I'd love to see.

 

Here's my setup... not the cleanest but it works holding my iphone.






I tuck my cable in when I'm not using the holder so it's not bouncing everywhere.















Mark

 

Cool, but what does the red thing do for you, exactly?

 

The red thing is just a cigarette plug that has two USB ports on it. It allows my iphone to charge at 1000mAmps to keep it charged.


Mark

 

Hey Orange, you know if you buy a charge-only USB cable then you can charge your iphone off the car's usb, without it integrating into the audio system. You can tell the charge/online USB cables by their cheaper price and lack of 2 out of 4 conductors.

 

Two questions...

a) so if it is a charge only, then you can't play your music over the radio, correct... doesn't really do me any good then.

b)I forget but if I were to use the stock USB port, doesn't it charge the phone but reaaaaally slowly?


Mark

 

I was wondering about the red thing too. Since your Y cable isn't connected to USB, you don't get display on the headunit or steering wheel controls. If you don't want or need those features, you may as well skip the awkward Y cable and use a cleaner alternative such as a Griffin AutoPilot. It uses a single cable to the iPhone dock connector and a short cable between the charger and aux jack.

 

Aux jack sound is not as good. The Orangecrush method is better.

 

orangecrush's method uses the aux jack.

 

RKW,

I looked at that link. Apparently you still need two cables, right? The connector to the USB but a completely separate cable for the audio. That would mean me having to plug in two cables to the phone where as right now I can just plug in my iphone jack and still play over the radio.

Obviously I can't see anything on the radio screen but I wouldn't be able to anyways. I don't really use the iphone for the ipod usage but more so for XM radio which wouldn't show anything on the radio screen anyways.


Mark

 

You would need to run only one cable from the iPhone dock to the charger. It carries both power and audio. A second cable goes between the charger and aux jack (that's a very short distance and you only need a foot long audio cable; you can use a shorter cable than the one they provide).

 

So how is that different than what I'm running?

Seems the same setup to me....


Mark

 

Oh, right, I meant to come back with my pics. The first one is my Griffin Autopilot Aux-In and charger. I had to splice in an extra foot or two of cable so I could bury it in the dash, and you can see one end of the splice in the second picture. The white thing is just a little wire-management removable hangar. The wire tucks up behind the knee bolster and threads up to come out alongside my steering wheel, where I have it zip-tied to my Craven Speed iPhone mount's arm. It's relatively quick and dirty, but it's very nice and clean.

 

And once I get up the spare time, I understand that removing the knee bolster is as easy as pulling off the trim behind the tach (it's press-fit), unscrewing the 3 obvious screws on the bottom of the bolster, which reveals screws that hold on the vertical bolster. I _believe_ that would get me to the point that I'd consider hard wiring the Autopilot in place and freeing up my cigarette lighter again.

Of course, once I do that I know damn well that the Autopilot would conk out.

 

Looking at your setup again, I guess it's not so different. It does allow you to leave out the Y connector which I think is somewhat awkward to deal with.