Many moons ago I replaced the stock AM/FM cassette deck in my K1100LT with a Pioneer MP3 CD player and mounted a Pioneer wired waterproof marine remote on the handlebars where the old handlebar remote used to be.

This worked pretty well since, re-encoded to 96 kb/sec, I could get about 350 songs per CD and, despite being vertically mounted, the CD player never skipped. However, I still had to carry around CDs and, since it would only read CD-Rs, I'd have to burn a new CD if I wanted to change my music collection. Not very hard with a 52X burner but still...

In 2012 I decided to upgrade to a head unit that would at least read SD cards so that I could have more storage that was easier to change.  I didn't want to have to redo the handlebar remote so I looked at the specs for various Pioneer head units and found that the MVH-P7300 accepted both SD/SDHC cards and USB storage devices and would also work with my existing remote. (There's also an 8300 model that does some Bluetooth stuff but I didn't see the need for that.) In early 2013 I got around to installing it.

Since it is made for cars, to get the video to work I had to add a 12V micro-relay to fool the head unit into thinking that the parking brake is on since you're not supposed to watch video while driving.

The control panel flips up where it has an SD slot. And here it is with a SanDisk 16GB Cruzer Fit in the USB port:

As an added benefit it is also Ipod-ready so I can plug my 3rd Gen Nano into the USB port and toss that in my pocket or tank bag and operate that with the handlebar remote. It charges the Ipod too.

And the backlighting color of the screen and buttons is adjustable so I set those to green to match the color of the bike.

My old speakers were pretty hammered and crappy sounding so I also replaced all four of those with new marine grade Polk db501 speakers.

 

© 2013 Drake Smith - Please do not use or reproduce this elsewhere.  Feel free to link to it though.