AAWireless - A wireless Android Auto adapter for your existing wired head unit!

Summary

AAWireless has been built by a team with experience in Android Audio head unit emulation. This is also why I was confident in backing this project. So far the experience has been pretty good. I have opened a support case for a smaller issue, but for now I can work around the issue using the provided "USB Passthrough" mode. It's almost as if these guys thought of everything!

Background

I am quite happy that I'm still driving around in my "first car". When I started a job in Amsterdam in 2018 I needed a car to reduce my travel time from 2 * 90 minutes per day down to 2 * 35 minutes per day. I purchased a '99 Renault Clio 2 which was a relative bargain and I am still quite happy with it. One thing that I wanted to improve was having a safe(r) way to have my phone provide navigation and music. I started off with a Raspberry Pi, a touch screen and the Crankshaft project. Unfortunately this wasn't always stable and the connection process would sometimes take multiple tries. Sometimes I even needed to reboot the entire pi to get it to work. This isn't really fun if you have people on board, asking you while we're not driving yet 😅

This is why I eventully purchased the Sony XAV-AX3005DB and took my dremel to the dashboard (again). The head unit is technically a double din unit, but in practice only the screen part is double din and the unit itself it very small! That setup has served me will with different phones but when this project came across my radar I had to check it out!

What is it?

It's a tiny device that you connect to your Android Auto-compatible head unit and it allows you to wirelessly use Android Auto without actually replacing your existing head unit. It connects using USB type C.

Does it work?

Yes! I've used it with my Huawei P30 Pro running EMUI 11 (Android 10) and it works with a few caveats:

• When connecting to the AAWireless adapter my phone shows a message about internet connectivity on this network. If I select either of the options in that message everything breaks. Instead I have to dismiss the message by making the "back" gesture on my screen. Unfortunately Huawei is to blame here, there is nothing the devs can do right now.
• I need to enable USB passthrough because when the AAWireless device works as a proxy the resolution is a bit off. I've contacted the developers so they are aware. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future firmware upgrade.
• The WiFi connection between the phone and the AAWireless adapter can be a bit flaky. I'm not exactly sure what causes it yet... When I'm parked in front of my home it works just fine, when I drive 50 meters it drops. Sometimes it will continue to drop and reconnect in a loop, sometimes it sticks after one retry loop.
• Sometimes the music has a bit of jitter. Most of the time it's fine tho... So not really a major issue but it does annoy me if it happens too often. Stable music streams are one of the reasons why I was pretty happy with wired Android Auto.

Conclusion

If you're willing accept a product that is only at the beginning of unlocking its full potential: this is it! It's awesome and I see no reason why it would break with future Android Auto updates (since drastic changes would likely break compatibility with older head units and I believe Google will try to prevent this if at all possible 😁)