2nd gen Joying Head Unit Thread

*takes notes* I'm gonna have to add this to the list of things to do.

 

anyone using a Google Pixel 6 Pro with this headunit? my stock non jbl unit drops bluetooth connection all the time and it seems to be a issue with older tech/toyota/or google. But wouldn't mind upgrading my HU as long as it doesn't drop my connection

 

Have that phone and no issues. But I also have a sim in the hu and dont stream from phone except for calls

 

OK so I got my unit in tonight I've installed tons of sound systems and head units so that was a simple task, took me all of ~15 mins to have it in and working but a couple of thoughts.

1. For those of you referencing the "clips" for putting the head unit in without the bracket/screws ... mine does not snap into place at all ... are you all just leaving it floating there and depending on the angle to keep it from popping out? that seems un-safe?

2. It was not at all intuitive to me that the buttons will not light up unless I turn the lights on. I eventually found a video on the joying site about it which showed me how to wire them to be on all the time if I want but I suppose them only being on when my lights are on is fine.

3. I've seen mentions of multiple launchers here and I would love to install one but also I kind of think it might be enough for me to just auto-launch carplay. A new background on the default screen would be nice too though, is there any consensus on which launcher people like most? If not does anyone have carlink 2.0 auto-start? if so how did you set that up?

 

Can you set this HU up to dim when the headlights turn on?

 

Oh boy are you in for a rant, I have been writing this up here and there over the past month. In short, yes, but it is entirely too bright!

Gripes and solutions (if known) after ~1 month with the Joying:

First off I am really enjoying (lol) this thing, although there were some moments of great frustration when figuring it out. It's WAY faster than my old Atoto unit (also android, but from 2018), and the display's larger size and resolution are tremendously great. But I'm here to complain, not rave. And before we do that, let me disclose that I haven't yet started down the rabbit hole of rooting the thing. This is just based on the factory configuration, which I've explored pretty thoroughly but perhaps not exhaustively. Anyway...

1. The radio tuner sucks! The reception is mediocre, but that's true of all Chinese android head units, they lack quality tuned amplifiers. What I'm talking about here though is the user interface. Why is there no seek button? Or even a good way to tune between frequencies? Without a physical dial, you are at the mercy of a touch-screen interface and the software controlling it, which in this case, is abjectly terrible, bordering on useless. Your only tuning options are a needle-style slider up top, which is too imprecise to reach any specific frequency, or the up/down buttons, which are slow and can't seek. Presets are nice, but it can only display (6) of them on each page (or "band"). Switching between pages causes the frequency to change, and also cycles through AM, even if you don't click on any of the presets there.

The only bearable way to peruse radio stations on long trips is to periodically perform a station search, which takes about a minute, then repopulates the entire presets list in a completely random order (perhaps sorted by signal strength?) split across three (for FM) or two (for AM) pages. If there are more than 18 or 12 stations, respectively, the rest don't show up. And doing this overwrites any prior presets, even if you painstakingly entered them manually for your home radio market. Instead, when you return to your home area and re-run the station search, your stations will show up in a completely new random order, split haphazardly across multiple pages. Considerable attention to the display is required to accomplish even the most basic tasks. Whoever designed this has clearly never operated a car radio while driving. Plus, the radio chip is not compatible with other radio tuner apps in the Play store, and I can't find much info on modding the newer Joying units running Android 10. So I am stuck with this utterly infuriating software interface for now. Does anybody know of ways to improve this?

Tip for other users: If you set the radio region to US in the settings (within the radio app, scroll right on the button area at the bottom), it at least tunes in 200 kHz increments on odd frequencies. Out of the box it tunes at like 50 or 100 kHz intervals (I forget), making adjustment even more obnoxious.

Plea to Joying: Please add seek buttons to your radio app, and even better, make this the default tuning mode for the up/down buttons!


2. Struggles with large media libraries. I have a 500GB SSD connected to my head unit, jam-packed with music, movies, books, audiobooks, and maps. I started with a 1TB drive, but scaled back for reasons described below. Even the smaller drive is wonderfully useful, especially since I tend to go places without any cell service.

The problem is, it takes the Joying unit a good 2 to 3 minutes to initialize the external drive, each and every time I start the car! During this time, the system is entirely unusable. Attempting almost any operation, such as launching an app, will cause the system to freeze. If you keep mashing the screen, it will self-reboot. And most alarmingly, if this self-reboot happens a few times in a row, the system will automatically perform a full factory reset, deleting all your apps and settings! All of this occurs without any error messages or dialog boxes. It doesn't ask your permission to perform the factory reset, it just does it. I wasted many hours figuring this out the hard way!

Tips for other users: Be careful if attaching large external drives to this head unit! Do not mash buttons until it has recognized the attached drive (a message will be displayed at the top of the screen). Don't bury the drive in your dash -- you will want to be able to unplug it if the system becomes unstable and starts self-rebooting, or if you need to use the head unit immediately upon startup.

One way I've mitigated this problem is by adding an "aux power" button to my dash. When depressed, the radio and other accessories remain energized, even with the key removed from the ignition. The button has a 2-hour timeout so I won't accidentally drain my battery. But I leave it on during long trips, so the head unit doesn't turn off during quick stops or fill-ups. That way it isn't constantly re-initializing the external drive.

I also disabled some options in the settings which I think might have been causing the factory resets. I forget what they are called, and am not sure if it helped, since I'm doing everything possible to avoid the situations that led to prior factory resets!

Plea to Joying: Please improve the software such that external filesystems can be initialized in the background, or cache this information between sessions, so that re-initialization isn't necessary. And pretty please, give us a way to decline automatic factory resets!


3. Bluetooth sucks. This one is well-known: Joying head units don't have a proper bluetooth stack, never have and probably never will. Only cellphones and certain Joying accessories (such as OBDII) are supported. But I was really hoping though that my compact bluetooth keyboard would work. I mean, it's just a keyboard, right? Wrong. Not even a keyboard is supported! Typing on the screen sucks, and doing it for hours on end (e.g., when setting up the unit after a factory reset) will have you wishing for a chiropractor... so I really wanted a functional wireless keyboard for this head unit.


My old bluetooth keyboard, it was perfect. (It was charging in the photo, not normally wired to anything.) Also shown: my cat.

Tip for other users: To use an external keyboard and/or mouse, you will need one with a USB interface. This is too bad, because it eats up a USB port, and also, my favorite type of compact keyboard (shown above) is only available with bluetooth. It was extremely thin but had proper key spacing for high-speed typing. Plus it lit up. USB keybards seem to be much bulkier, and I can't find an adult-sized USB keyboard that will still tuck away in my console. But I found an okay alternative:


USB wireless thumb-keyboard device

This one is too small for real typing, but with actual physical buttons rather than a stupid piece of glass, I can still thumb-mash words a lot faster than on a cellphone screen. Plus it has lots of extra buttons such as volume control, play/pause, and a scroll wheel. Finally, it has a touchpad, not a particularly good one, but it works well enough to operate all aspects of the head unit from the comfort of the seat, rather than straining forward to reach the stupid touch screen. Oh, and it lights up too!

Plea to Joying: Stop ignoring your customer base and add full bluetooth functionality to your devices!


4. The display is too damn bright! This one should be #1 on the list really, but I've got a passable workaround for now... The display on this thing, even when set to 0 brightness (that's zero--as low as it goes) is ridiculously, obnoxiously, dangerously too bright for night driving! Here's an undoctored photo (well except for blocking out the view of my chaotic garage through the windows) of the display at night. My parking lights are ON here, which does indeed dim the display (to zero, as I have it set), but it is still this bright. My dash lights are turned up to maximum brightness. The photo looks underexposed, but I specifically exposed it so that the brightest part of the Joying screen is 100% white in this image. (Normally a camera will overexpose the brightest part of a picture, to give you a better view of the dimmer parts.) So this is an actual comparison of how bright the Joying screen really is, again at zero brightness, compared to the rest of my dash at night. (I happened to pick the shitty radio tuner app for the photo, which is a fairly dark UI with a small amounts of white text. Displaying something with more white, such as a topo map, is utterly blinding!)


Ridiculous! Compare this to the photo of my old head unit above (the one with the cat!)

I'm at a loss here, there is absolutely no reason to have such a high minimum brightness automotive LCD. It is stupid and dangerous. At the upper center of a photo is a bit of dim white text, if you look close you will see "0.0 mph". That is also an LCD--a rearview-mirror-integrated dashcam with backup camera. It is displaying a perfectly clear and non-blinding image from the camera in my rear bumper. You just can't see it because of how insanely fucking bright the Joying display is.

Here is the same exposure, but with the EV set to +5 in darkroom. That means everything is 32x brighter. (That's why it looks so grainy too.)


Same image, 32x brighter

As you can see, I have a pretty well-lit cab at night. I have foolishly installed little red LEDs all over the place--in the cupholders, door handles, cubbies, etc. Plus, there's a particularly bright always-on red overhead map light. That's right, I have a red light that's bright enough for reading installed in the overhead light assembly, and I find it so non-irritating for night driving that I didn't even install a switch to turn it off. None of this interferes with night driving. What does is this stupid Joying head unit with it's gigantic blinding display, which again, is set to zero brightness, yet is 32x brighter than the brightest pixel in the above image.

To offer reasonable brightness compared to the rest of my dash at maximum brightness, the Joying minimum brightness should be 50x lower than its present lowest ("zero") setting!

So how the hell are you supposed to drive at night, other than by turning the whole head unit off? Well what I've settled on for now is an app called Night Owl, which dims the display to an acceptable level at the click of an icon on the home screen. There are many others like it, I tried several, and this one sucked the least. It is adequate but not ideal for two reasons: First, it has to be done manually, rather than dimming automatically with the headlights. I do have the headlight illumination wire connected to the head unit, and the display does indeed dim when I turn them on, but because that's still 50x too bright, I have to manually dim it the rest of the way with this app. Second, the Night Owl app achieves the dimming mostly if not entirely in software (e.g. as an overlay), rather than actually reducing the LCD backlight brightness. So the range of adjustment is limited, and the display contrast and readability degrade substantially at the required darkness levels.

Without getting into too much detail, LCDs are basically rectangles of uniform white light (the "backlight") covered by an array of tiny "valves" (pixels) that control how much light gets through to the front, forming an image. Each valve can go from open to closed in 256 steps. The highest step, 255, is the maximum brightness, i.e., white (actually red, green, or blue, but that's irrelevant here), and the lowest, 0, is the minimum or black. But even when fully closed, the valves still leak a bit of light. We are all familiar with cheap LCD screens, and how they still glow gray even when the image fades to black. In the early days of flat-screen displays, plasma TVs had a huge advantage over LCDs, just because they didn't look like stupid glowing gray rectangles when movies faded to black. LCD manufacturers have worked to improve the quality of the valves, so that they wouldn't leak as much, but even the best ones still leak some amount of light. To really solve the "fade to black" problem, they figured out that they could dim the backlight depending on the content of the image displayed. Only then could LCDs truly fade to black, or show dim images without looking like stupid washed-out gray rectangles.

Unfortunately the backlight in the Joying head unit is 50x too bright at its lowest setting, so we are stuck in the obnoxious gray glowing rectangle regime no matter what. But software such as Night Owl can still dim the image, by preventing the LCD valves from opening as much. Normally, for full brightness, images would be displayed using the full range (256 steps) of each valve, but when dimmed, the valves are limited to a lower range of values. Let's say we wanted to properly darken the display by a factor of 50. Then, images could only be displayed using the lowest 256/50 = 5 steps for each valve! Computers in the 1980s had better color depth than that! And those 5 steps provide very little contrast, since even the lowest step (0) is a dull obnoxious gray glow. The usable dimming ratio is a lot less than 50x! So while Night Owl does prevent the Joying display from blinding me at night, it does so at the cost of contrast and image quality, and doesn't fix the problem of having a gigantic obnoxiously glowing rectangle in my field of view at all times, and I still wish I could dim it further. Even manually dimmed, it is by far the brightest thing in my cab. What's so infuriating though is that this is a trivial problem to solve -- just turn down the fucking backlight!

I'm not claiming to be an expert on this... perhaps there are ways to further reduce the backlight, and I'm just throwing a tantrum over my own ineptitude here. (In which case please let me know!) But my brief research suggests this would require the system to be rooted, and I can't find specific evidence that it's been done on these newer Android 10 models. Perhaps I'll try that someday, but for now, this seems like a pretty infuriating problem, and I can't believe more people aren't complaining about it here. How the hell can the rest of you see the road at night over the blinding glare of this stupid LCD screen?

Tip for other users: Use an app like Night Owl so you can see the road at night!

Plea to Joying: Reduce the minimum LCD backlight current/PWM by a factor of at least 50!

 

oof

Wonder if it's any different with the other sized versions.

 

The auto-dimm settings are tucked away under General -> Backlight Control -> set to Small Light Control.

I've also noticed this unit seems to work best with 2013-15 JBL systems as far as everything working as it should out of the box

 

Did you have Entune with Navigation or Entune Plus with Sat Radio?

 

I put 3M double sided mounting tape under each clip to both keep them from pulling off when I removed the headunit but also to thicken the clip for a tighter fit. My fits really securely with ONLY clips. You have to get your hand back in there and push all the wires, modules as far in and to the side as possible (top and bottom) before snapping it in.

I'm really happy with the AGAMA launcher. Worth the few bucks. My only gripes with the unit right now are how inconsistent Carlink (Carplay) connects, the poor mic quality, and screen brightness. Sometimes its immediate, others times in a few minutes, or at times NEVER during a 30+ min drive. It'll say Verification Approved and Connected but won't go to the Carplay screen.

 

Entune with Nav

 

Interesting!

One of the things I was hoping to
Do was to just set Carlink to auto open so it would just default to CarPlay being on and I’d never have to deal with anything else.

I actually stole the background from OP on some wallpaper website and used Nova Launcher and it’s a decent start for now at least but I think defaulting to CarPlay would be better if it’s possible otherwise I’d want to play with making a custom background image or icons probably

 

I have mine set to autolaunch AGAMA, then I set a delayed launch of Carlink 15 seconds later. That way I can access a few apps from AGAMA that I might want like front camera, radio, equalizer, or settings before Carlink fires (if/when it does).

 

how did you get your ajt temp knobs to have red and blue like that? did you paint them or did you order custom?

 

You can order different colored screws from his website

 

There is a seek function. I wish I could remember how I got to it. It is not obvious. I may try fiddling with it later to see if I can get it to happen again. I have the unit with the knobs, so that may be the trick. But the radio is not as intuitive as it should be. A seek/scan button is pretty standard on most radios these days. They should have included one.

Regarding the media library, Joying says on their web site that they support up to 64GB USB flash drive. I have a 64GB USB flash drive and it loads very quickly. Yours is 500GB, well beyond the stated support size. Perhaps the load time is why.

The LCD backlight could definitely be lower at night. I too have mine set at zero. For the most part it doesn't bother me except when using navigation. For some reason, my maps don't switch to night mode in Android Auto, and the white background is too bright at night. However, as I do run my headlights when it is overcast, I can still see the display during lower lighting conditions, which I could not do with the factory head unit if I turned the headlights on during the day.

Have you considered a tinted screen protector?

 

I've noticed that on AA as well. But you can go into the settings within AA and set it to Night mode manually. You just have to do it every time

 

Did you play with the second set of backlight/dim controls? I was also pretty ticked about the screen dimming at night (when heads lights are on) but found the hidden/convoluted second set of pass-code (= 5768) protected dimming controls that are buried in the pass-code (= 3368) protected "factory" settings. You can really crank them way down to next to nothing.

 

Brilliant! Thank you. My factory defaults were 90 for max and 80 for min. Slid my min down to 25 and then had to go re-adjust the night brightness in the display setting. I do believe that will work just fine.

Also, to scan for stations you press and hold the >| or |< buttons for a second and it will scan for the next station when you lift your finger off the screen.

 

I found this user manual for Joying head units. It is from 2016 and some of it is out of date, but it may be helpful:
https://cardroid.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Joying-User-Manual.pdf