Christmas Songs in March? Well it's festive, and I'm in a festive mood after hitting a major milestone! Let me explain:
So as you may remember I had
decoded the Series 1 Radio images , as used on the Pontiac G8, a (long) while ago back in 2011 and even got to the point of injecting new images. However at that point I was doing a favor for someone else and they never took it anywhere. That frustrated me quite a bit a to be honest, so when I recently had the opportunity to work with some guys over on CarModder to pursue a similar project but with the IQ Radio System (found in the Holden VE E2/E3 cars) I really wanted to make sure that it was something that would lead to a feasible end product. After a decent amount of testing it appeared that YES this could be done!
These IQ Radios are definitely different 'enough' from the original S1 radios we have here in the States. Higher resolution screen, more colors, better UI (Red or Blue depending on platform), Wallpaper, Touch screen, larger Boot Animation, different processor architecture etc. etc, So any of my previous work was basically useless and I had to start from scratch. (on a side note - I'm planning on doing a conversion to an IQ Unit in the near future...)
First off was finding what kind of graphics were in there.. It really didn't take me that long to find a bunch of interesting image data, but some of the encoding proved to a bit a stubborn. After quite a few baby steps though I was able to see all the graphics they had stored in there. Here are just a few of them.
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| Blue Wallpaper - Red one used in GTS |
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| Partial graphic of Backup Sensor Screen |
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| Oh look it's a Wagon! |
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| Partial Frame of Chevy Boot Animation |
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| Frame of Holden Boot Animation |
So... now that I was able to read this stuff out, how about sticking something new back in? Well that proved to be a little bit harder since there were a few limitations on the data encoding that weren't obvious from the extraction. Attempt after attempt were made to write the data back, yet somehow the image would always come out looking weird or messed up. Finally this last weekend after attempt.. oh.. probably 30-something, I found the proverbial 'last piece of the puzzle' and we were able to successfully upload a custom wallpaper! And that is
WITHOUT taking the radio out of the car :)
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| Tadaaaa! |
A Million Thanks go out to the guys @ CarModder, especially Jezzab, for helping me test this stuff. This is naturally only 'Step A' in our diabolical ehmm i mean great plan. Hopefully more interesting things will soon follow .. Maybe now I'll finally be able to get back to implementing custom boot logo's on those S1 radios for the G8 folks... Just have to find the time!
