Caution: Microcontroller In Use
I like my car's CD player. Panasonic makes good car audio electronics. However, in the current generation of CD players there is one very strange oversight. There are two perfectly good RCA input plugs on the back. The catch is that they do not show up as a source. Why? Because they are the CD changer input. Otherwise, there is nothing special about them. They only work when there is a CD changer plugged into the DIN-8 plug next to them.

Therefore, the task is clearly to fool the head unit into thinking there is a CD changer present. I managed to find an excellent source for doing this with PIC controllers, but I thought it would be nice to implement on Atmel. So, I more or less translated his code. I was surprised that it worked on the first try, especially since timing appears important, and I did have to rescale all of the routines to run on a different chip at a different clock speed. Nevertheless, it worked.

I added a nice 1337 message to the display and I considered sensing whether there was input on the input line before showing the source in the menu, but decided it was quite a bit more work to do it safely. As it turns out, the Panasonic system is very flexible. My initial worries about hitting the 8μs clock proved to be unfounded, since only after getting the whole thing working did I realize that my DIVBY8 fuse was on... the entire thing worked just fine at one-eighth the intended speed!

Tonight's Enterprise, In The Mirror, Darkly, Part II, was fantastic. Many plot twists and excellent Trek nostalgia. I'm also fairly certain that the last two episodes were the most sexually explicit Trek ever. While not quite as provocative as the Dax/Kira lesbian relationship in DS9's mirror universe, the sheer volume of the scenes pushed boundaries. It was also interesting because much of the episode was on a replica of the original TOS Enterprise, where Kirk "befriended" many women. Seeing these scenes now, with little or no censorship, certainly contrasts 1960's to the 2000's. Unfortunately, only three episodes of the show remain. That should be the end of Star Trek for a long time.