The last post was describing the official customisation options I chose, this one’s about an unofficial one where you’d use a solder iron and hot glue gun to get it done. About the kind of devices that are added to the bikes’ 12V accessory rail.

CarPlay display

Aimlessly driving around is fine sometimes but not if you got the be places. Beforehand calculating and memorising the route and hoping to not encounter any diversion on the road sucks.

All this could readily be solved with a cell phone holder on the handle bar, but then there is the issue of fit, vibration decoupling¹, and the fact that a proper setup costs several times as much as a (waterproof one, extra for motorcycles) CarPlay Screen costs.

The bike came with a weird Sumitomo connector on the accessory power lead, which I did have to specially order and didn’t end up fitting, but since the order quantity was 2x male, 2x female ones, I simply replaced both ends.

Auto-playing whatever was played last

Every time the iPhone connects, it would continue playing the last song, podcast or audiobook I was listening to. Unfortunately, not only does it do that when I connect during active playback, it will happily resume any stale old MediaSession that had finished days ago.

If this was once per ride, I think I could cope with that. But every time I need the key, say to access one of the storage boxes or phone charger compartment, I need to turn it off. Which means once I turn it back on, it reconnects and starts playing.

Then during charging the accessory rail is powered, which is good because then I can use it to charge my phone, but on the flip side turns on the CarPlay display as well. Especially annoying: Depending on the charging station’s interface you have to key the bike on and off to end the charging and release the cable. You also do have to key the bike on as a form of authentication to change the target charge limit.²

Unfortunately there’s neither a setting for that on the phone, nor on the device itself.

Shortcut

I tried creating a device based shortcut that pauses the current playback several times spaced apart by a few seconds each, every time the CarPlay display connects. But it still keeps on playing or the shortcut isn’t run. I haven’t found out which it is.

Turning the volume down

A viable but annoying fix is to turn the volume of the display all the way down and let it play whatever is currently playing.

Headset

The device is supposed to have two bluetooth connections, one coming from the phone and another one going into the helmet headset³.

My hope is that this might solve the issue because the CarPlay connection takes a while to load. And connects to the helmet before it connects to the phone or at least before playback starts. Or then once connected to the helmet headset, pause via the helmet controls.

I’ll report back.

Turn by turn navigation

Even though the playback issues are annoying, I wouldn’t want to miss this thing. It really helps me get where I want to go. Re-routes quickly if I deviate from the path and reliably warns about heavy traffic ahead.

Curve preview

But the best feature is the curve preview. With a small glance you can see the shape of the upcoming path, aiding you with estimating the next curve ahead and how fast or cautious to take them.