Upgrading the terrible 8” 2020+ CarPlay/AA Radio to a Kenwood & Maestro RR

All done! Honestly looks pretty factory for an aftermarket radio. I adjusted the button colors to try to get them to match the dash as close as I can, so they are a cool blue. Not perfect but close enough. The results turned out great and I’m glad I decided to dive in. Now I know the ins and outs and can clarify what’s necessary for others with the same years. I think it’s awesome that I still have full control of vehicle settings and it will still tell me what doors and hood and such are open as well.

 

Here’s some more info on the music screen on the cluster. It lets me choose a source to control/view, so I selected CarPlay since that’s what I use.



When a song is on, I can see the song, artist and album. They are a bit cut off and don’t scroll, but whatever. When I am in this view with the song showing, clicking up or down (on the right side directional pad, not the left volume/seek pad) will change songs. Up will go to next song, down will restart the song and go to the previous song with an additional click. Probably won’t use that much since I have SWC on the left side of the wheel, but cool regardless.



The Nav screen is still on my cluster, but still useless/blank. No big deal, it’s no different than it was stock with no Nav anyways.

 

Do you still have your factory radio? I'd like to buy it from you if you do

 

I do, but I’m not looking to get rid of it.

 

QUOTE="BLtheP, post: 27395470, member: 394355"]Here’s some more info on the music screen on the cluster. It lets me choose a source to control/view, so I selected CarPlay since that’s what I use.



When a song is on, I can see the song, artist and album. They are a bit cut off and don’t scroll, but whatever. When I am in this view with the song showing, clicking up or down (on the right side directional pad, not the left volume/seek pad) will change songs. Up will go to next song, down will restart the song and go to the previous song with an additional click. Probably won’t use that much since I have SWC on the left side of the wheel, but cool regardless.



The Nav screen is still on my cluster, but still useless/blank. No big deal, it’s no different than it was stock with no Nav anyways.

[/QUOTE]

 

Did u have the nav in center screen before the install

 

No.

 

Weird wonder what is adding this. I don’t have nav or music on that screen. Wonder if there’s some wires not connected behind the oem radio for this since yours works now

 

From the factory, I have the Nav and music screens on the dash. Neither of them showed anything. My radio had the Nav app but no Nav would work when I’d open it. It kept telling me to go into the Toyota owners app and add the feature to my truck, which I definitely could not figure out.

when I swapped my radio from stock to Kenwood, along with the Maestro RR to adapt everything, my music section in the dash started working. The Nav is still an empty section on my dash. So I have 6 sections on the dash, now 5 of them work instead of the 4 that worked before.

 

I’m missing nav and music somehow the music was added to yours not sure how though (connecting some wires)

 

Music started working on mine when I went to the aftermarket radio. I’m guessing the maestro is sending that info to the dash whereas the stock radio wasn’t. I imagine from the factory that only works depending on what radio you got. Aftermarket the maestro is probably set to do that for all of them.

 

ok guess it’s the signal from the radio that adds it like you’re saying. Weird this oem one doesn’t have it

 

It is very likely transmitted over CANBUS. That is how radios and tcase modules and the cluster and all that type of stuff usually talk to each other. My guess is some stock radios output that information on the CANBUS circuit and others do not. You and I got ones that don’t, but the maestro I upgraded to does so that it can provide the feature in other models that had it stock, which naturally adds the functionality to my truck which didn’t have it originally.

Just my guess anyways.

 

Ugh. Guess I’ll live with it I like how the radio sounds and have CarPlay so it’ll work

 

Man that alpine with the 11” screen is tempting though ugh

 

Wanted to update this thread. Things have been great since the radio install, except every now and then the radio reboots. It goes completely black, and about 10 seconds later it turns on in exactly the same manner as if I turned the truck off and back on. At first it happened maybe once a month, now it’s more like once a week, and it actually happened two days in a row today and yesterday.

it’s not a wiring issue, hitting bumps doesn’t change anything, etc. I have done a bunch of googling and the cause seems to be common with the Maestro RR. Apparently it happens on a lot of them. The RR2 is the better version of the RR which I opted against a few years ago because I thought it was only features, and not better reliability.

I ordered an RR2 and installed it this afternoon, programmed exactly as I had the other one. Time will tell. If the radio goes a month or so without rebooting, I will consider the problem solved.

something I am still not fond of, is how much clutter behind the dash the aftermarket radio creates. I bought some plain wire and plan to get in there and extend all the Maestro connectors eventually, so I can relocate the Maestro down below the cupholders, near the gearshift. Might be a project for this coming weekend as I now have the wire on hand. Not difficult, just time consuming.

 

Would you sell your old head unit?

 

At this time, no. I don’t intend to sell the truck but sometimes that decision can change quickly. If I had no stock head unit to go back to, I’d have to leave all this stuff if I were to sell it. I am a mod remover and return everything back to stock when I sell. So, unless I ever upgrade my unit to a larger screen model and have my old aftermarket to spare, the stock radio is going to stay with me in storage.

 

I saw the reply right after posting to the first guy. I was just too lazy to remove the post I apologize

 

Looking to solve a backup camera issue I’m having (see my latest post) and came across this. I had the rebooting problem a while back and fixed this by powering the head unit bypassing the RR for power. But, idatalink may have fixed this with a firmware update anyways.

I posted about it in 2020: link.