GPS / Cellphone / Music

Finally finished the setup I was looking for. I initially purchased a TomTom 720 on sale during this past Christmas b/c of its advertised bluetooth connectivity with cellphones and would also play music. I finally got all the components together today and it took some geek-work, but it all works together perfectly.

I tested it out, and I can control everything by touchscreen and listen to music while I ride (I know, I know, be careful...) and when a call comes in, it automatically kills the music and prompts me to accept or decline the call (could change to auto-accept, but I'm not big on calls form the in-laws), then cranks the music back up when the call ends. I can instantly kill the music with a touch of the screen if I need to. For a headset, I used an iPhone dual-earbud/microphone combo. I haven't tested the mic for wind noise over 35 mph. But so far, so good.

I tried searching the forum for a similar setup before I went off trying to piece it together myself. Has anyone had any success doing something similar?

 

I've thought about something like this but haven't done it. I'd be interested to see pictures of what you've done. To which device are you attaching your headphones?

Thanks for the post!

 

I'll take some pics this weekend. I promise, it's very anticlimactic. All you actually see is the GPS and a thin audio cable going from the bottom of the GPS to the underside of my helmet.

The headphones are attached to the GPS... GPS plays mp3's off an SD card and bluetooths with my cell phone. I keep my cell phone in one of my jacket pockets or backpack if I'm riding with one.

Next phase is to find a hi-fi bluetooth earphone/microphone setup to get rid of the wire from the GPS to helmet. For whatever reason, the bluetooth on the GPS doesn't like standard bluetooth earphones... something about it has to be hi-fi. I was reading on TomTom's website to try to learn more. Something like this I think:

http://www.a2dp.info/Newsflash/Bluetooth-Headsets-for-Motorcycle-Enthusiasts.html

For the meantime, this is the earpiece/mic combo I ordered. A friend just bought an iPhone and I was able to test her headset/mic that came with her iPhone with my setup, so I knew it would work before ordering. For less than $20 shipped, I couldn't resist. I have an earpiece/mic combo I used with my cell phone (Motorola i580) before I tried this whole setup. It worked fine, but the earpieces are not meant to play music, just voice. So when I played mp3's through them, the sound quality was anything but exciting. Hers that came with her iPhone sounded great, so I ordered similar ones that would stay in place under my helmet.

Digital Hi-Fi Ear Grip Stereo Earphones Hands-free Headset for Apple iPhone 3G / iPod (Smoke) - iPhone and iPod Accessories Super Store

 

So, I updated the TomTom software and my setup stopped working (the phone call part anyway). After researching TomTom forums, apparently programmers changed the feature in the update that allowed phone calls to be outputted through the line-out port. Now the call defaults to the internal speaker/mic.

This obviously isn't going to work for me and I couldn't find a hack online yet to change it back. So, the TomTom (or CrapCrap as I'm currently referring to it as) is in the garage in pieces. I'm trying to see if I can wire up plugs to the internal speaker and mic to plug my helmet headphones/mic into so it won't be an issue going forward. Curse those computer programmers and their ideas of "safety first"!