# Nexus 5 head unit - phone, not tab



## ninetysix (Dec 6, 2009)

gallery link


Well I got sick of waiting for the market to come to me with a flac playing head unit with spdif out, so here we are. Nexus 7/various android tabs have been well documented for this purpose, but phones don't get much love.

I don't really have room for a tab or even double din in my car so this makes the most sense to me. I just upgraded to a nexus 6P and thought about using my HTC one m8 gpe for it, but it was in good condition still and is very tricky to open up to bypass the battery... So I swapped it with the Mrs for her LG nexus 5 which already needed surgery for a broken power button.

I think the nexus 5 is the perfect phone for the task. They are very easy to work on and looking on eBay there dozens available locally for well under AU$100 with faulty power buttons or other non deal breaking faults. The hardware specs are more than capable for everything I need it to do too.

Battery bypass is very straight forward, where the battery connector is on the motherboard there are 3 round copper tabs that are easy to solder to (see pic above, just below the blue square) that correspond to NTC, -, + from left to right. I only connected + and - and it worked straight away. I'm using a single cell from a RC car battery for now till my 12-3.7v power supply arrives.

The rest of the setup is a powered 4 port USB hub (need a 12-5v supply for that too), a generic PCM2704 USB DAC, a RTL2832U dvb-t dongle (awaiting delivery), a joycon exr steering wheel interface card (awaiting delivery) and a USB stick for flac storage.

So far so good, connect the DAC and USB stick to the hub and connect that to the phone with an otg cable and it just works perfectly straight away. The DAC is feeding spdif over coax to my minidsp c-dsp 6x8 and it works very well.

Still need to build a fascia to mount the phone, it's slightly taller than a single din socket but I'll work something out.


Updates to come

Cheers


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## TwistdInfinity (Jun 7, 2015)

Love it already! 

Sent from my D5833 using Tapatalk


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