DIY Nerds

So I’ve been looking to awesome out my car with a decent dock that’ll integrate my iPhone into my car. I’m not looking for anything special, just something to hold my phone and keep it within arms reach. I also want to charge my phone when it’s juice is low and stream some tunes. I bought a griffin TuneFlex for around $35. It worked great. It has an integrated 3.5mm audio out and charger. The CLA (cigarette lighter adapter) has an attached goose neck extender that swivels and stays in position. The dock portion (let’s call it the seat for the sake of this article) is mounted on a connector which rotates 360 degrees and ratchets/locks into 9 preselected positions. This solution was perfect, I used a cassette adapter plugged into the 3.5mm connector of the TuneFlex to stream music from my music library and Pandora.  After a few months of awesome, the ratchet mechanism stopped doing what it’s supposed to… ratchet and lock. The techy nerd in me wouldn’t accept such desecration to the finest technological advancement of modern history… yea, that’s right, the Iphone.

I set out to find a replacement with little success and honestly I didn’t want to shell out another $30-$40 on something that wouldn’t last. This is when I decided to take matters into my own hands… I set out to build a dock that will last longer than a couple months. There are a few requirements that this dock needs to satisfy:
1) Must provide mechanical stability
2) Charge the phone
3) Allow me to stream music from the phone to the car stereo
4) Not cost an arm and a leg
To satisfy the first design requirement, I needed something that fits the phone and is somewhat aesthetically pleasing. The seat of the FlexTune is very well design and could possibly be the best thing about the TuneFlex, so I decided that it’ll be the heart of the dock.
The simplest and cheapest way to charge the phone and stream music is by utilizing a cable that has a 30pin ipod/iphone connector at one end and USB A & stereo 3.5mm connectors at the other. A quick google search led me to the site of Rad Tech and they had what I needed for around 20 bucks. This took care of requirements 2, 3 and 4.
Now for the assembly… I used two screws to secure the seat to two button caps on my dash. I ran the 30pin cable through the holes for the button caps and down the side of the center console. I snaked the cable around and pulled it out by the bottom of the center console. The 30pin connector of the cable fit perfectly in the seat without any dremeling. A 3.5mm male to male adapter and a couple of tie wraps later I had an awesome car dock for the finest technological advancement of modern history.
Check out the pictures!