Rosen Navigation systems

So for the Toyota Highlander I bought a few months back my wife wanted a navigation system. We agreed that OEM would be best but toyota pretty much doesn’t even offer the stereo as a supported upgrade once a car is delivered and piecing together a system was going to cost me over $3000 it appeared. So I looked into other options to keep the OEM look. It came down to known chinese units on eBay that ran $500 to $800 or this other 3rd party companies product “Rosen”.

Rosen appeared to be better (if solely due to marketing) as it integrated with the factory steering wheel controls and amp etc. I decided I’d buy the unit (DSTY0830H11) and ordered from the lowest price vendor I could find (toolfetch). All in all it was a little over $1000 to get a OEM look navigation system. If only I knew then what I know now.

The system “ok” if you really just want a CD/DVD player with Nav and radio. The software is nothing well done for those options but not terrible either. However if you want to use MP3 playback, oh man it gets bad! Apparently the software allows only up to 2gb non-sdhc microsd cards and if you have a bunch of folders of music… Well… It plays tracks one at a time, in alphabetical order. You can’t choose tracks in anyway shape or form other than choosing next or previous tracks. When you finish the LAST song in a folder you get a menu to choose a new folder. Once that’s done you have no way to choose again until you finish THAT folder too. Needless to say this is un-usable and I decided to look into what could be done.

Upgrading the stereo appears to be offered only if you send the system in and there is no way to tell if they might have better software now or not. Upon thinking about the poor functionality in the software it becomes quite obvious the system IS a $500 chinese player that’s been tooled up to have a really nice install and integration. So knowing this I would have preferred to get the cheap one to start and work on software. Since I already have this we’re going to have to modify it.

The system appears to have 2 distinct sides. The GPS/WinCE side (with 1 SDHC enabled slot), and a Radio/DVD side (with DVD, bluetooth, radio, and 1 non-sdhc slot) which I currently know little about.

The SD card has the map software on it. Looking briefly into how it works we can see it’s got iGo 2006 software and calls it via a maplaunch.ini file specifying \nng\nngnavi.exe to run. With a quick attempt at tossing in total commander’s .exe as this file we get into total commander for wince and can launch up explorer. We now can see we are actually running WinCE 5.0 with 100mb ram. I intend to later test if we can run mp3’s from the wince enviroment and possibly find some better software like TomTom etc. From the explorer I can see there is a second memory slot/unit of some kind called Nand Flash2 which appears to have nothing in it. I will have to spend some time looking into the options from here and will post back when I find something more.

This entry was written by Shadowmite , posted on Wednesday July 27 2011at 05:07 pm , filed under Hack Related, News and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink . Post a comment below or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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