[Android Head-Units] Dewieinns:
Brief background: I am very car electronically savvy; from installing car stereos and remote car starters to building custom car wiring harnesses & programming various control modules + electronics repair/building.

A few months ago I purchased a generic touch screen headunit from Amazon.ca. While it did most of what I wanted it to the fit was bad, there was no provisioning for an external microphone (and the internal one sucked) and there were a few other quirks. I opted to return it.

After some research I found the "Autopumpkin" brand of Android Head Units; they seemed to have an online support presence and they even had a direct fit unit for my car (mkiv VW Golf). In my car I had the factory head-unit with steering wheel controls (which worked nicely) and I had some reservations about it - so I contacted the company via their website:

2016-02-26

2016-02-26

As you can see they got back to me right away; I was quite surprised and happy. The unit is supposed to be direct plug & play with my car and will work with my factory steering wheel controls. I went ahead and purchased my unit:

There was some confusion with regard to my Postal Code and the City in which I live; the folks at AutoPumpkin had some very old data somehow which was listing me as being in a wrong city. This delayed the unit being shipped by a week and a bit:

2016-03-07

I received my headunit about a week later (understandable given it was coming from China) and had to pay duties on it (also wasn't unexpected).

Out of the box I could tell I was going to have an issue; the unit looked great etc but the adapter for the antenna was different than what was in my car. I have an early VW so I have the single smaller round disc connector (later cars apparently have some sort of dual plug amplified setup). Fortunately I had a spare antenna adapter harness for my style of car and I was quickly in action.

While the unit came with two different harness adapters for the two different plug configurations I realized right away that the adapter harness for the early style didn't have wires connected for steering wheel controls. With my early style harness the control wire is in a separate harness; I figured I would have to wire it up manually.

I installed the unit and was quite happy with it all things aside; it works great and as I intended. Shortly after plugging it in for the first time I realized the supplied harness wasn't quite right. The IGN and +ve Constant power wires were reversed. Every time I shut off the ignition the unit would die completely and loose all radio presets etc. I swapped the pins in the included harness and was in business. Things were working as expected; but the "Instrument" dimmer wire also wasn't connected. I hooked this up to the instrument dimmer wire but it has no impact on the lights being on/off nor the screen brightness.

I hooked up a USB webcam and configured it for use as a dash cam; I played with software etc. I plugged in the external Mic but it appeared to be dead to the world (no impact at all) and, through my brief research, discovered it was common for terrible mic quality but people were unhooking the front facing mics and soldering leads on the Bluetooth module directly for excellent quality results. I was not scared of doing this; when I had time.

I, unfortunately, was pretty busy with other things in life and didn't have a whole lot of time to play around with trying to make the steering wheel controls work. When I finally got around to it I wasn't having any luck at all making them work. I scoured the internet looking for people having similar issues but didn't run across any information specific to my issue; so I sent an email directly to the original email reply I got from AutoPumpkin assuring me everything would work.

2016-03-16

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2016-03-22

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2016-03-27

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I waited a few days and sent them another email.

2016-03-30

I waited a week(+) and sent them yet another email.

2016-04-08

It has since been several more days and I have yet to hear anything from the company either way.

This past weekend I disconnected the internal microphone from the face of the unit (cut a trace) and have determined that the provisioning for the external mic doesn't work at all. I've tried several different mics and can't get even a hint of static out of the thing when plugging/unplugging the mics in (Called a buddy's cellphone from my paired phone and listened). The internals of my unit are a fair bit different than anything else I've found online & my Bluetooth module/main boards aren't as conveniently labeled so no soldering happened.

Ultimately I have 2 outstanding questions to be happy with this unit:

How do I get my Steering Wheel controls working?

How do I make the external Mic work with this unit?