I never used to think the radio was important in old Ferraris. I go by the philosophy of "the crappier the car, the more important the radio". But, for me, all that all that stuff about glorious engine noise just goes out the window when you have a long motorway trip to do. So I started on a nice period stereo rework..... and got carried away with it. This has had so many false starts (2 versions of iphone pic controller, one raspberry pi and hifiberry dac v1) but now it's starting to come together even if it's very much a prototype which looks a bit rough around the edges for now. I've got some ideas about how it will look when finished and a few hidden features........ I was going to finish it and post it all here in the form of a how-to but now I'm putting it out there anyway as motivation to finally finish it this year. At least I've listened to it! It's a fine sounding stereo based on a raspberry pi v2 and a hifiberry dac completely integrated into an old Sharp RG-9500. It has its own wifi network in the car and is controlled either by phone or the old head unit itself. The idea: Choose a nice, period stereo, ditch the cassette mechanism. Replace it with a Raspberry pi but connect up some I/O pins to the cassette controls and give it a real mechanical feel, just like the old tape deck. Use an external DAC and proper connectors to get the best possible sound. Read audio files from the local network / NAS / usb. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
My car came with a Blaupunkt Bamburg - the one with a microphone and recording tape deck, often fitted to Porsches in the late 70's and this one made it into my car when supplied new by the UK dealer. It's just a bit too "gadget" for me and I prefer other models which look and sound nicer. I really like a Pioneer KE1300 / 2000 / 4300 / 5300 or Component. They look good, have an excellent FM tuner and looks-wise the aluminium kind of goes with the whole dashboard. But I had two Sharp RG-9500 lying around (one new and boxed!) and, well, since these cars never had factory stereos.... the Sharp does vaguely have Ferrari credentials by virtue of its advertising. Anyone have any idea if there was some kind of relationship here? The Sharp is quite good quality and has no integrated amplifier, instead it has a 50w RMS power amp which I've fixed under the passenger toe board. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Here's the Bamburg I removed. I might put it up for sale if anyone is interested. I might put a raspberry pi and hifiberry dac in that one too. But do I really want to go to all the trouble of making the microphone work? I don't want a mic just for decoration though. What to do with it? Thoughts? Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Modern and hidden. Unlike many 308's, the door cards have not been butchered on mine. You see so many with the speakers stuck to the door card but although it looks bad, the speaker does need to be on the door card in order to have any kind of box to resonate in. Originally the speakers were just attached to the metal door frame with a half-hearted attempt to seal them to the door card with foam - terrible. So I opened up the fibreglass inside of the door card using a dremel to take bigger speakers but this doesn't show since the vinyl covering is intact. I then fibreglassed two wooden rings into the inside of door card to space out a 6,5" speaker and to provide a nice solid surface to attach the speaker to (from behind). It was necessary to trim a little metal away from the door frame. Again, this is neat and invisible; just a question of enlarging the hole made by the factory. And a weight saving too, kind of. Sorry, lost the pics of the work inside the doors, will take some more next time the doors are apart. Image Unavailable, Please Login
1. Making a line-in. This was fun! It took an entire night with signal generator and oscilloscope to find where to inject the signal. It was confusing because as I traced the circuit, both the cassette and radio signals seemed to be going into the preamp at the same time. On this old two-channel stereo, the switching mechanism is done by adding 5v to one of the inputs and then filtering it out. 2. Add a relay. This now controls the choice of input signal. This is just held on place with a tyrap for now, all will be secured with proper brackets once the position of all components is finalised. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
3. Add in the micro switches. FF, REW use the original mechanism but with microswitches - it feels just like the csasette mechanism. APSS (remember that?) now controls another microswitch which swaps the inputs. The stop/eject button (which on this sharp is by pushing the vol control) now operates pause. The metal tape button activates the wifi network. And the Dolby button..... I kept the dolby. Who else has Dolby for their digital music? It was always useless as the engine noise does a better job of drowning out tape hiss. Again this bit needs neatening up but the position and feel is perfect. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
4. Package it up. Trial fit the raspberry and dac into the space where the cassette used to go. More work to do here but you can see the idea. 5. Power supply. Add a 12v to 5v power supply for the raspberry. Just sitting there for now. I've also positioned a wifi router but might just use the usb dongle. Still deciding on that. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
6. USB inputs. since I'll mostly be using USB for music (a mix of wav, flac, mp3, wma) I'm making a plate to go behind the casette door. It will be useful as a charging port too. 7. A bit programming and configuration on the RPi. Again, this had some false starts. I started with Volumio but didn't realise that, in order to get it to run on earlier RPi's, it has a rather cut-down version of linux which hampered my efforts to add wifi and various other features. So it now has Rune Audio running on Raspbian and uses the MPD to to make the microswitches control the player. Well, the pictures are pretty ugly but like I say, I have heard it and it sounds nice, the controls work and now I just need to finish the thing before insanity sets in. More to follow.......
LOVE this. I have wondered why someone hasn't started a side business through the internet for this. The companies out there that do are really focused on big American AM radios only. If I send you a Blaupunkt CR3001 or CR3003 will you do another (for a reasonable fee)? I have several and the best is in my 308 now so if you mess it up, no worries.
Magnesium, you're one of my heroes. Awesome job. Love the concept, although I think you could get by with USB instead of Wifi. Now you've got me wondering what it takes to integrate a Pi with a quality D>A converter... So much coolness here. Thanks for sharing.
Does your Blaupunkt have a DIN socket on the back with a cap over it? If so this is an Auxiliary In and there are Blue Tooth modules like this one which may work for you. There are ads on eBay for Becker/Blaupunkt modules so it appears the module works on both brands. https://www.ebay.com/itm/291576505696
Also this company apparently will do the conversion internally for you.. R and B Vintage Radio Home No affiliation. Just been researching the same thing.
Good day Magnesium Well done on a very cool project! I have been collecting the various bits I need to do something similar for my cars. In my case I was planning on using Bluetooth link (audio) so I could stream my smartphone stored music to my period stereo. For the amp, I have designed a few high end home audio amps and so I was going to scale these designs so they would work and fit into the retro stereo unit. The last bit was to embed a FM tuner just in case the smartphone etc was unavailable. I could try and resurrect the stereo's original radio portion, but I would rather use my own, as then I can integrate everything into a single design. That being said, please keep us up to date on your progress! Cheers, Sam
I'll be surprised if they will do this to a typical single DIN Blaupunkt cassette circa 1981. I have contacted a couple companies over the years and they have told me they only convert something you would see in a 50 or 60's American car. Things along those lines.
Do you have a hunched back assistant who says: "Master, the storm is at its peak!", before you tell him to throw the switch?
Awesome job, very impressive. I looked for someone to do this kind of thing years ago, with really no luck. A company called Pyramid said they probably could, about a decade ago, but "probably" wasn't very comforting. I might have to give them a jingle when the time is right.... if magnesium chooses not to do more of these.
Great work & great idea to just use the shell of these beautiful old things. I'd leave original units in working order alone, though. There's surely a plentiful supply of scrap ones waiting for just this kind of mod.
I see several vendors at car shows selling these retro radios. I always look their display up and down hoping to see an Alpine or something but to no avail. You want one for a '57 Chevy or '69 Camaro? Tons of options. None for us..:-(
Yes I have! Or have I become the hunched back assistant, from years of leaning over the innards of car radios.... and my master's voice is just in my imagination? I did warn that it's an insanity project. That's a nice Blaupunkt, I'm tempted........ will think about what next when this one is fully finished. PM sent. And as to why someone hasn't started a business doing this, well......... Just adding aux inputs is easy and there are quite a few people out there doing that. In fact, my advice to anyone wanting to simply add aux input to an old radio is to seek out a retired electrical engineer in your neighbourhood and interest them in your car / project. An explanation / schematic of what to do is here (no affiliation and in french, sorry). Conseils techniques: connecteur ISO autoradio But doing something custom and connecting up various buttons on the old radio, it's going to be $$$, like any properly done custom work. Would be fun if the market exists though. Thanks for the kind words from others on here too. When I'm done with it I'll probably put up a .img for the pi, a component list and a wiring diagram. Still some work to do though.
What a difference some encouragement from fchatters makes! I put some more hours into this.......... and then some more...... and it really is almost finished. Apart from the positive comments, something that has helped a lot is going back to Volumio - the latest version solves a lot of software problems I was having in making the pi act as an access point. It's also got some cool new features on it. I may well change to Rune Audio again but that will be easy as I have installed the RPi so that changing the SD card isn't too difficult. In my research I spoke to Chrome London (who currently have a Bamburg for sale) and who proved to be very knowledgeable. They do bluetooth conversions and they also put me onto Aurora Design Neither of these provide quite what I was looking to do but both appear to be quality solutions. No affiliation to either, just mentioning them for people wanting a simpler conversion. Back to the insanity project - I'll post some photos with minimal explanations......... will add video when it's all working.
Final mounting position of RPi on cassette transport chassis. All components assembled and wired in. Long wires temporarily soldered together....... And then finally the first mount of the RPi inside the stereo. This cassette transport chassis has been in and out very many times and part of the idea was to make this nicely constructed so that it can be assembled / disassembled easily. Hopefully there won't be much need to do so but there are no hard-wired connections, everything can be mounted and dismounted. You might make out from the photo: A power distribution board. Earth distribution is done in a spider from a single point (mostly) - that seems to be good practice for audio. I did solder directly onto the HifiBerry DAC card. This was more for space saving than anything else but the other end of those connections are all screw terminals. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Once the RPi was mounted inside and I finally got the lengths of the standoffs correct, it was time to work out the wiring runs and install connectors. The HifiBerry DAC sits neatly on top of the RPi and doesn't take up much space. That was one of the reasons for choosing it but it's surprising how quickly that space gets eaten into with wiring. The last pictures show the install almost complete. The wires sticking out the front are awaiting a reset / shutdown switch which will be somewhere behind the cassette door. The block connector on the hanging out the back is temporary and will be replaced by an inline fuse for the 12v - 5v DC power supply which is now attached to the chassis. One thing I found out was that powering the RPi via header pins is ok but it bypasses the PPTC fuse. I was going to add one of these to the power distribution board which would have neatened things up but keeping the power supply by micro usb also means being able to power it independently for testing with greater ease. Now only a few things remain - a mounting bracket for the relay (I already installed standoffs), some tweaking of the ff / rew switching (it works but needs tweaks to the triggering), the power supply fuse and then onto some final customisation. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
