Well, since having had my car burglarized a few weeks back, I just now got my new radio in.

Here is my new unit- Kenwood Excelon x891


This one is a decent upgrade from my old deck. It'* biggest feature is the USB input. Now I can keep all my music with me on a portable hard drive. I picked up a 100GB mini Maxtor drive for this. Since the radio limits the USB to 500mA current, I needed an external power supply. A simple 7805 will give me the 5v I need. Here'* the goods


Probably overkill on the heatsink, but I've got 3 of those collecting dust. Anywho, a little soldering...


Also on the overkill note, I'm using some of my extra liquid gallium for thermal paste between the heatsink and the regulator. I love this stuff.





Ready to roll


Daytime photos



Nighttime photos




Its good to have my tunes again. I'll be removing my faceplate from now on with the hopes of keeping it around a while.

that is a nice head unit

a friend of mine has a kenwood excelon in his ford lightning, and he loves it

looks nice.

is there really a need for that large of a heatsink. I've never had voltage regulators get that hot. a small heatsink would do.

Does it need that big of a heatsink? No. It does get hot as I'm pushing the regulator to its max around 1.5A. I used it because I have 3 of these Intel heatsinks sitting on my shelf and I didn't want to buy a small one if I didn't have to. I had plenty of room to work with inside the dash so space didn't matter either.

so the x891 will read a 100gb hard drive then. I wasn't sure if they would or not but now that i know that answer that is the head unit I will be going with

The biggest problem I assume most folks have is the formatting. All the USB car stereos I've seen require the drive to be formatted in FAT16 or FAT32. This is fine for most flash drives as they come formatted in FAT32. But for external hard disks, they generally come formatted as NTFS. And, with mine, you can't reformat it to anything other than NTFS in windows using the right click, format option. I had to use Partition Magic to format it into FAT32. Also, as my pics tell, most external drives need more power than the deck will provide. So you'll also need a power supply. I've seen some 12v USB supplies that would be a simple plug and play power adder (as many drives have 2 USB pigtails- 1 for power and data, one for extra power).

i think i'll just get a small power inverter and locate it in my center console, i don't use it for anything anyways