Today I received the sad news that a wonderful friend and MINI owner, Diane, has passed away. Diane had been fighting cancer for some years, and while it appeared that she was winning when we saw her last year, in the end you can never win

(Diane with husband Jim in Bar Harbor)

Before Diane’s struggle, she regularly attended MINI events, driving hundreds of miles from her home in Maine to attend events as far away as New York! Here are some pictures from events that both she and I attended …

Making name buttons in preparation for MINIsOnTop 2006, with Jim:

At the 2005 MINIsOnTop check presentation:

Advanced Driving Skills School:

MINIs Making A Wish (one of Diane’s favourite activities), chatting with Steve:

Waiting for Ice Cream:

Diane chatting with Mart, at Headlights For Lighthouses:

Ready for Ice Racing:

With many friends at the first MAMA drive (October 2003):

(obituary can be found here)

More than a year ago, I installed MINI’s high end factory stereo DPSM system in GPMINI – it sounded very good but lacked the punch of good subwoofers (which I subsequently solved!)

A few weeks back, I noticed a slight background noise from the speakers, when music was silent – it sounded a little like the clicks & burbles of failing electronics.
This past week when I drove GPMINI again, my heart nearly stopped when the speakers suddenly started “exploding”, cracking with such a loud force that I felt the breeze on my legs! A scary deafening thudding noise!

I was pretty sure that the DPSM amplifier had failed – but to confirm it, I removed the Alpine head unit and temporarily re-connected the original … after a couple of minutes, the same explosive noises occurred (apparently the amp fails as it warms up).
With Josh’s help, I was able to confirm that the amp turns it’s “error” light on every time the speakers crack – it’s as if it realizes it just failed, and shuts itself down for a few seconds.

I bought the DPSM kit from MINI of Peabody and called them – it turns out happily that the kit has a two year warranty, so once I took the car in for them to confirm my diagnosis, they were able to order and install a replacement amplifier.

This morning I headed down and got the keys, then spent half an hour re-installing my Alpine head unit and putting the dash back together (including re-installing the glove box) … then a nice 100 mile drive to check that everything is once again working perfectly, which it is

Many thanks, Scott and everyone at MINI of Peabody, for getting my car back together so quickly!

Another in the occasional iPhone series!
Today I learned on Macrumors a way to get 2.0 software on my iPhone – successfully; then I downloaded a few apps to try …
There’s a lot of “imperfect” so far, with Mac iTunes failing to sync multiple times, needing to authorize the PC and Mac so that apps could be backed up (stupid!), and overall the many months of 2.0 hype result in an iPhone that’s hardly different to the one I had this morning.

Still, one app – Pandora – is mind-blowing incredible! You create a (free – for now?) account, and tell Pandora one or more music artists you like (I started with Electric Light Orchestra, Genesis, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton), then you let it play.
It’s cool enough on a PC/Mac, playing music from artists you specify and others that it thinks you’ll like (and so far in an hour, I’ve thumb-down’ed just one track) … but installed on the iPhone, it’s just EXCELLENT:

I shut down WiFi on my iPhone, and it happily streamed music using AT&T EDGE … great sound through the iPhone speakers!
I plan to hook it up via AUX input in the car tomorrow, and see how it handles playing during my journey to work (very unfair, since AT&T is basically awful in Essex) … if it works, it makes me wonder why I’d still pay $13/month for Sirius, when I could pay $36/year for Pandora …

The only disappointment (imposed by Apple) is that it doesn’t keep playing when you switch to a different app

UPDATE: I’m not the only one that thinks this

Since The Great Ice Cream Run last year, I’ve been listening to Sirius Satellite Radio in GPMINI, using a receiver hard-wired in to the Alpine head unit, giving clear sound and artist/etc displays.
In GBMINI#6, I installed a factory AUX input cable and I’ve been using the “portable” Sirius receiver that I bought last year for my Sirius<>XM comparison; I had the little receiver stuck in a cup holder, which allows me to hear it but makes reading the display and pressing buttons a little tricky!

Over the last week or so, I’ve been updating the sound in GBMINI#6 – the factory iPod interface came out (which is un-necessarily challenging due to the way it is installed), and I have a Dension Gateway 300 installed from MikeyTheMINI (more on that, later!) … side note: It’s a bit easier to work on the stereo in a Convertible, dropping the top gives you lots more visiibility

So I decided to tidily install the Sirius receiver; I tried a few places and finally settled on putting it under the toggle switch panel … with the help of my work colleague Christian, a piece of copper was bent to provide a nice bracket to fit the receiver to the bottom of the switch panel, and I’m really quite happy with the results!

Yes, it’s happened … goodbye Blackberry, hello Apple!

An early – and expensive – birthday present

In some ways, I feel that the iPhone is a little like our MINIs … when I first heard about the iPhone I felt “interesting … but I don’t want one”
But then came the day when I actually saw one close up, and tried it – actually it was an iPod Touch, but similar – and using the web browser to visit GBMINI.net was a revelation! Look at how it renders the webpage exactly how it looks at home … look at how the text is readable even though it’s teeny tiny … and wow, it redraws wider if I turn the thing round, even easier to read
At that time, I had no idea about zooming, scrolling, etc – but it was so cool and it just seemed to work “right”. Once you’ve tried one, you don’t want to use a regular one any more – similar to how I feel with MINIs.

Margaret, also, is close to falling for an iPhone – although she’d never own a MINI. So I guess they’re not quite the same

Anyway, to put this slightly “on topic” (do I have to do that for my own website):
I tried the iPhone in GBMINI#6 tonight – with the R50/R52/R53 factory iPod interface. The iPhone put up a message about not being compatible:

And yet, it actually played fine, working just like my regular iPod with the factory interface – which is, pressing CD6 to get any music (I haven’t bothered creating MINI1-5 playlists), and basically having no ability to navigate or see what’s playing:

You can press << and >> to navigate track by track (or 10 tracks at a time if you hold the buttons down), but with no way to know where you are, it’s best just to use random play mode.
Random play actually works better on the original factory iPod than on the R56 – in that pressing << / >> skips to the previous/next RANDOM track, but against that, the HU forgets that it’s in random play every time the car is turned off (or even if you just switch to radio).
Another plus of this factory solution over the R56 is that it continues where it left off after you turn the car off – but the negative here is that if you disconnect, then on re-connection it goes back to track 1. That’s a big pain in the iPhone, since you’re very likely to remove it from the car whenever you park.
Finally, you can’t look at the iPhone to see what’s playing, since it displays an unhelpful blank message:

Curiously though, you can still browse the web, check email – and presumably use the phone (but the wires not long enough – I’d have to put my head in the glovebox!)

Meanwhile, back in the land of iPhones – and following DB’s lead – I put the Content Robot iPhone WordPress plugin on to GBMINI.net … so now, my website displays quite differently on an iPhone to how it displays normally.
I can’t decide if I prefer the original “webby” layout, showing complete entries and pictures but very small text, or the iPhone custom layout which is much easier to read, but doesn’t show the whole page:

Feedback, please

I haven’t decided whether to stick with the factory stereo and iPod adaptor, or put in something aftermarket like the Alpine in GPMINI; so far I’m definitely missing any useful iPod control – the factory system for the R50/R53 is really not very functional! You have to set up playlists called MINI1/MINI2…/MINI5, otherwise you can choose “all tracks” (which is what I’ve done so far, since I haven’t yet set up any MINI-specific playlists). The R56 iPod interface was more useful than that … but at least this older one doesn’t seem to take a minute or more to get ready to play music!

My normal habit would be to choose “random” play and see what comes up – if I like it, I can turn off random play and stick with that artist/album for a while. If I don’t like it, I can ship to the next track (which didn’t work on the R56, but does in the convertible). However, this factory system “forgets” that random is turned on, every time you select a different source (radio, CD) or turn the car off and on again.
So now, it’s switch on the car, and press “RND” every time.

Also of course, there’s no display of track/artist/etc, just a number. And no practical way to select a specific track either – when not in random mode you can -> skip to next track, but pressing that however many hundreds of times to get to a particular artist/album/track would be crazy!
Yes, I can set up the special MINIx playlists, but if you put a reasonable number of tracks in any one playlist, you still wouldn’t want to step through it; and if you make small playlists, you only have five possibilities to choose from!

I tried selecting a track on the iPod before connecting it, pressing PAUSE and then connecting it – didn’t work! The factory interface just did nothing at all (I think it was trying to find “MINI1″ playlist); if I pressed “CD6″ to select “all music” then it would start from the first artist/album/track and not play from the paused track I’d selected already.
Maybe if I set up “MINI1″ playlist to be all tracks … I wonder if that would work then to be able to pause a track and then connect it?

So, I bought an AUX input cable, planning to connect up Sirius. But the AUX input cable isn’t working?! It never shows “AUX” when you step through the different MODEs; I did the “blind” cable install by pulling down the drivers knee bolster, but I’m 99% sure the cables connected OK; I guess I have to disassemble the downtubes and pull out the radio to check for sure.

Meanwhile, a quick question: is there anyone out there with the factory iPod in an R50/53, also with AUX input connected and WORKING?

I recently found something curious – initially I thought GBMINI#5 had a German accent, but now I’m not quite so sure what accent it is!

Most of the NAV voice prompts are pre-recorded, but recently I heard the car announce the track number that was playing on my iPod – and it’s an accented computer generated voice:

So, what do you think? German? Something else?

(anyone is keen to listen to this clip(!) can download it here – and thanks to 1pixelout for their WordPress audio player)

To round out my opinions on the stereo system of the R56 with navigation, here’s a quick look at Sirius satellite radio. The factory system is very expensive, especially compared with a sub-$100 standalone receiver that you could connect to the AUX input … but with the factory system it’s fully integrated to the car, there’s no additional antenna on the roof, and you get your first year of service included.

When you access satellite radio, the NAV screen shows a list of all channels – every one has a check mark next to it, assuming you’ve activated the receiver. Seems a bit odd to show that; why not simply omit channels that aren’t available! But anyway, you get a list of channels and you can rotate the joystick to listen to any one – with less than 200 channels, it’s much easier than the iPod

You can call up a “Details” display for the channel you’re listening to, which shows the artist/title info – but nothing else!

I’m sure this would look fine on the non-NAV R56, but it looks a bit empty here. It would have been better to integrate with the channel list, like the iPod interface does.

You can set up a list of 12 presets for your favourite Sirius channels, you can also access the list by Genre if you wish – but personally I find the 12 presets sufficient to cover all I need, making it extremely easy to access the music I want to listen to.

One interesting feature is that the satellite radio seems to be “instant on”; when the car turns on the music is immediately playing – there’s no delay for a couple of seconds while the receiver powers up and syncs to the channel. I’m guessing that the receiver powers up when the car is unlocked, giving it a headstart, but however it’s done, it’s a noticeable improvement over non-factory solutions (and yes, 2 or 3 seconds isn’t much of a delay, but it’s better if the delay is zero!)

A little bit unusual, but not quite off-topic

I was contacted a while ago by Roy (COOPSTR on NorthAmericanMotoring), saying:
I am trying to install an original 05′ Mini head unit into my 86′ Porsche Carrera. When I turn it on it shows DISABLED. Any suggestions as to a work around? I have been told that it is because it does not have the required Bus signal (also, see this thread)

I knew all about the “DISABLED” message, having worked with the MINI HU when developing my HKenabler – the HU expects to see iBus communications on it’s pin 13, and refuses to operate without it. It’s a security feature to discourage people stealing the MINI HU.
Back in 2003, GBMINI#2 came with a security code card – you could enter a “secret” menu of the HU while it was installed in a MINI, and changed it over from “iBus” security to “CODE” security – then after a power off, it will ask for a four digit security code. This is how I was able to use my HU on the bench.

Now though, the MINI HU no longer includes the CODE feature, so Roy was stuck. At least until I did some bench testing, and discovered that the iBus security check is quite easy to resolve, especially with HKenabler experience! So after resolving a hiccup in my solution, Roy was able to achieve his goal, and was kind enough to send a couple of pictures:

I’m impressed how good it looks in Roy’s Porsche – and as you can see in the second picture, it’s happily working and decoding RDS information

UPDATE: I had to add one resistor to the HKenabler to make it work as a MINI radio “de-security” module; see picture in the Gallery

GBMINI#5 came with the iPod interface installed – good news because I’m not sure I’d have liked to pay $500+ for it!
In GBMINI#5, the iPod cable is installed into the “secret” storage space above the glovebox – you push the dash trim piece (firmly, in the center!) to open it, and inside is an iPod connection cable:

Like most iPod interfaces, the iPod goes “dead” when connected, just displaying a graphic and “OK to disconnect” screen:

The storage area is rubber lined, and the cable helps to hold the iPod, so it doesn’t rattle around – good!

When you’re planning music, the NAV screen has a quite nice display showing the current track, along with “before & after”; there’s a submenu option to toggle “Details” on and off, which gives you the artist as well as the song title, for the current track:

Sadly, that’s pretty well where the nice iPod interface ends! For example, here’s what you might think is a nice menu of artists on the iPod:

What’s so bad about that?
Well: notice first that we have “CD2″ selected, and above we had “CD1″ selected. The iPod interface is implemented by mimicking a CD changer; CD1 gives a menu of music in Playlist order, CD2 is Artists, CD3 is Albums, CD4 is Genres, CD5 is Podcasts and CD6 is All Songs.
So to get to the Artists list, I had to switch from CD1 to CD2; to do this you simply push the joystick up, a couple of times, then rotate, then click. But then comes the really “exciting” part … I had to wait EIGHTY SECONDS for the Artists menu to appear!
When it’s finally ready, it automatically starts to play the first song by the first artist – of course that’s probably not what you want, so simply push up, click, rotate left, and click. Now finally you have a list of Artists, with the first alphabetic artist shown.

OK, so we want to listen to a different artist. How about Supertramp?
There’s no way to quickly jump to a specific letter of the alphabet, or even to move by more than one menu entry – the only choice is to rotate the joystick to go down through the Artists; this of course takes FOREVER (worse still because the display update is slower than the rotation speed!)
Luckily, it doesn’t take quite as long as you’d expect – cleverly, the iPod interface is limited to 255 menu entries! So we actually can’t get to Supertramp anyway; in fact the screen above with Lucero as the last item, is the end of the menus.

Alright then, how do we get to Supertramp?
Well, I could build lots of Playlists to set up different ways to access my music – maybe a Playlist for “A”, “B”, etc … but I saw someone post online that method doesn’t work because the menu gets overloaded and still runs out!
Plus, the menu is only one level deep – for example, here I accessed via CD4 / Genres and called up “Electronica”:

As you can see, what appears is just a list of songs. There’s no sub-menu of Artists or Albums first … it looks like the song list here is in Artist order (it’s displaying tracks by AudioBody), so I guess with enough knowledge of what’s in your iPod you might be able to scroll down the list to get to the song you want. Although I suspect the list of songs might still stop at 255 entries!

In the end, I’ve decided to use Random play which hopefully will give me a random choice from all the songs in the iPod:

Of course you have to be careful what you have selected – counter-intuitively, “Random All” apparently randomly selects from a subset of all music in the iPod, depending what you have selected; it acts more like you’d expect “Random Directory” to work …
Infuriatingly though, when it’s playing in Random mode, the skip previous/next buttons don’t skip to a different random track!
Suppose you have Random play active and it selects an Artist you don’t fancy listening to today. In GPMINI with the Alpine HU I click -> (next track) and get some new random song. But in GBMINI#5, if I click -> I get the next song from the same Artist/Album; exactly what I don’t want!
The only choice is to click the joystick to turn off Random play, then click again and turn it on again.

I really wish the iPod interface was better. It should be much faster (my Alpine/iPod interface is instantaneous when I select by Artist/Album/etc), and there should be no problem with having music collections of more than 255 Artists/Albums.
As it is, I don’t expect MINI to do anything different, and it will be hard for an aftermarket company to develop something – the MINI is becoming more and more proprietary and difficult to change.
I wonder if the non-NAV iPod interface is any better. Maybe it’s slow on the NAV because it has to display more on the bigger screen? I hope one day to try my iPod in a non-NAV R56.
As it stands, I probably would still have to spec this iPod interface in a future R56, since the only other choice is connecting via the AUX plug and using the iPod controls (and honestly, trying to wave your finger around the iPod controls while driving is much worse than using the R56 NAV joystick!)

But much better is out there; why can’t we have it?
(anyone seen that Ford / Microsoft car advert where the driver presses a button an SPEAKS the Artist name to get it to play? sounds wonderful!)

Oh, nearly forgot – one more ludicrous limitation of the R56 iPod interface!
It doesn’t remember where you are in the current playing track, when you turn the car off – well, if you switch off for a short time it does remember, but after a few minutes it will revert back to the beginning of the track when you come back to the car! That’s really annoying when you’re listening to a long track, and never get to the end of it.