Wednesday 3 December 2014

Auxiliary Input for Toyota Caldina 2003

It took a while to figure out how to get this working so I thought I'd write it up in case it saves anyone else the trouble.

My car is a Toyota Caldina 2003, and it has a Multi AV Station II that looks like this:





To get auxiliary input for both sound and video, you need one of these cables:


I bought mine off Ebay from here where it was listed as a "Audio Video cable for Toyota car audio parts Blue 6pin connector to 3 RCA female". I also saw them called VTR cables.

Once you've got one, you need to get to the back of the stereo and plug it in. Luckily the Caldina's are fairly easy to access. I followed these steps on Answers.com and found them very good. Once you get to the back it should look like this:


The blue six-pin plug is the one you want.



Plug the cable into that. Personally, I then used a 3.5mm to RCA cable for the sound (Red/White) and a single RCA cable for the video (Yellow) and fed them into the glove compartment.

Once you've got the stereo back into place. You need to get the stereo into Video mode to use the new connector. This can be tricky to figure out as it is all in Japanese but here's what you do.
  1. Press the TV button.
  2. Press the button just above the AM FM button that's in Japanese, I think it's the Tuning button.
  3. Press the VIDEO button on the touchscreen. If it doesn't show, play something into the RCA inputs, I had to play some music from my phone in before the button appeared.


Once you've pressed VIDEO with any luck you should have the music playing through the car stereo.

Before I put it all back together I checked the video functionality by plugging in a Raspberry Pi, which worked no problem.


That's all there is to it, hope it helps.