wkearney99
Senior Member
DeLicious said:Limiting the scope of my reply to just your last sentence, as I can't comment on most of it
As for pairing a Dot with your car radio, I do exactly this in my Nissan Rogue. I have a Dot (fits perfectly in the cup holder!) that I connect to my stereo over bluetooth and use my phone as a hotspot. It gives me full access to my Amazon music library and Alexa functionality in the car with responses over the speaker system. It does have a few downsides: 1. I can't use my phone with bluetooth in the car since the bluetooth connection is used by the dot, but I try not to talk on the phone at all while I'm driving anyways, or just hand the phone to my wife, and 2. the background noise and road noise inherent in driving gives the Dot some troubles with detecting when I am done talking, so it will often continue listening even after I've finished my request. In any case, it's a work in progress!
Oh I know how it's supposed to work, and my phone will pair perfectly. But not a Dot, Tap or Echo to the PCM (their acronym for the radio) in my Porsche. That and it's not like there's too many people out there that have spent this much money on a vehicle to be all that interested in making it work, let alone will to guinea pig with it. That Alexa doesn't yet work in Germany makes it even less likely for a rogue engineer to 'hack' ways to make it work.
Upside is I've got some CANBUS engineers coming to Maryland to spend a weekend hacking into the bus on mine to make one of their gadgets work with it. I fully intend to both pick their brains and plant a few ideas of my own. So with luck I'll be able to learn a few things and cultivate a few more channels to find a way into the system. So... close...
As for automotive assistance, right now it has the ability to show my phone's e-mail and texts. And will not read or show either of them if the vehicle is moving. I can bring up an index of them, to see senders (and subjects for e-mail) but no content while moving. This is a good thing. Apparently it'll even send canned tweets to twitter. I don't see using that, nor would I expect any other PCA members, for that matter.
Another upside is being able to share points of interests and routes bi-directionally between my phone and the radio. That feature I do use and it's much more convenient to find an address on my phone and automagically have that come up on the PCM.
It's clear the system in there is a lot more extensible than the car radios of just a few years past. The trick is getting past manufacturer recalcitrance and secrecy to learn just how much more...
But for now I'd settle for being able to turn on some kind of diagnostic logging to see what's happening with the bluetooth pairing.
