[Android Head-Units] kaween:
Yes you can, providing correct conditions are met.

First of all and this is the most tricky part, you must get a USB-OBD with a very specific USB-Serial chip inside as the Android version in the AN21 only supports certain USB/serial interfaces. For the one it doesn't know, there's no easy way to add the needed driver. In case of our unit, it needs/wants a Prolific 2303 chip to run. Problem is : there's no way of telling if the chip inside the OBD interface you're buying is a Prolific or something else, unless the seller agrees to hook it up to a Windows PC (I'd recommend doing this anyhow before hooking it up to the radio... reason see later) and look if the unit is being recognized by Windows as a "Generic Prolific 2303" device (check the devices hardwareID) and warrants you this is the version he's selling.

Downsides ? Well there's one forum member who reported frying his unit by using a defective OBD interface. That is sad, but it can happen : if you have a USB memory stick that is defective or where the inner contacts have corroded, exactly the same thing can happen. In fact, damaged USB ports and electronics are seen by me on a daily basis as people are far too sloppy with their USB sticks, they wind up in the washing machine and what ever, and 2 days later such a usb stick commits bloody murder on the USB port of a PC.

The OBD-BT system works well enough not to mess with this stuff in my opinion. Unless you've no other choice (having a BC5 with no means to upgrade for example) or unless you just want to see if it can be done like I did, it's not really worth the work/trouble/risk. The only problem *I* faced with my old and aging generic BT-OBD interface was that once in a week or so, the radio just couldn't reconnect to the OBD interface because the BT chip inside the OBD interface had "crashed". It would be impossible to make contact to it, even not using another Android device, till I'd take the OBD interface and unplug it from the port for a couple of seconds. That revived the OBD interface.

This may be a specific behavior of my car or the version of OBD inside that old interface, I don't know. I only know the wired version from the same seller has no such issues.

---------- Post added at 03:48 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:35 PM ----------

According to TheSSJ this root method works fine as he's tested and confirmed the validity of it.

If in doubt, contact him. "dangerous" : if the instructions are followed correctly, I do not see any danger using this method. The warning is a disclaimer in my eyes : proceed at own risk, nothing more, nothing less.

Certainly if you would not have a backup of your current Zhoon-specific software, I wouldn't experiment using "our" firmwares. I don't think you risk bricking the unit, but if you're not careful, you could pick the wrong resolution for example (your unit has a 1024x600 display for example : installing a 800x480 by accident will leave you in a world of hurt !!!!. Also, there's a risk that specific tools/apps like that DVR capability is a specific Zhoon-solution which isn't available on the other generic firmware versions.

So either man up and try the manual hack, or contact SSJ by phone or whatever so he can talk you through it if need be. Choice is yours. :fingers-crossed:

Or I can simply check the validity of it on my spare unit this evening which is currently running a non-permrootable 2.9.5 and see if I encounter something odd/terrible/problematic.