Parrot CK3100 Install On 2007 Chevy Cobalt With Sony MEX-BT3800U Radio

I just finished installing the CK3100 kit in my girlfriend's Cobalt, and everything works perfectly.  I thought I 'd share my thoughts and experiences.

After unboxing everything, all the wires & connectors can look a little intimidating, and it may not be perfectly clear how the Parrot mutes the radio.  It's actually not that complicate at all, if you lay it out where you can visualize it.

Take that bulky-looking black box thingy and put it on a table..  Now take the two bundles of wires that have black connectors on the end, and separate them, to make it form a "T".  Put the set with the male connectors on the left, and the set with female connectors on the right.  The wires on the male end will connect to your radio, and the female end will connect to car's factory harness.  Think of it like a light switch.  When you get a phone call, the Parrot energizes that yellow wire, which in turn "cuts off" the path from the radio to the Parrot's mute box.  The other side which is connected to the car's harness (and ultimately the car speakers), allows only the audio from the Parrot to get through.  So when you're not on a call, all the mute box is doing is just passing the audio through.

"But what if my radio has a mute wire?  Can I just connect that and not all those other wires?"  Well, you can connect the Parrot's mute wire to your radio's mute wire, but you still need to connect all the other wires.  Remember, the audio needs to somehow get from the radio to the car's speakers.  That's what the black box does; passes it through.

I connected the mute wire to the Sony's mute wire, and by doing that I was able to snip off the other three mute wires (with the female ends).  When the Parrot activates the mute wire, it's energized.  The Sony mutes itself when its mute wire is energized.  However, you can still turn the volume back up while on a call, if you want.  All the radio's doing is pressing the mute button for you.  it doesn' t keep it permanently muted for the duration of the calll.

When the Sony radio was installed in this car, the installers chose to crimp connectors directly onto the factory wiring, instead of using a harness.  Why they did this I don't know, but whatever.  So all I had to do was crimp male connectors on the Parrot wires that go to the car's harness, and female connectors on the wires that go to the radio.  I then plugged in the Parrot wires with female connectors into the Sony wires, and then the wires with male connectors into the car's harness.  Put the radio back into the car, snapped the trim panels back on and powered on the unit.

Her phone (and my phone) is a Sprint LG Optimus S Android, and I had a bit of trouble getting it to pair with the Parrot.   To get it to work, I had to go to Advanced Settings, choose Pair Phone, and chose the option with AT sync.  No other option would let the phone pair with the Parrot.  I did get auto-pair no sync to work but of course, it didn't sync my phonebook.

The Sony head unit has bluetooth as well, and that's what she was using for her handsfree kit, but it's a tremendously crappy solution, so bad that it's what drove me to get this kit.   Because it has Bluetooth, she was uisng it to stream Pandora to the radio.  She still wanted to do this, AND use the Parrot kit.  So the las tthing I had to do was go into the phone, and then in the Bluetooth options for her radio, I unselected the Phone profile, so that when the radio connects to her phone, it wouldn't use any phone-related functions.  The Android can pair and connect with two devices simultaneously, as long as the devices being paired use separate profiles.

The end result is flawless:

- I can hear her perfectly.
- She doesn't have to hold a phone and try to drive a stick shift at the same time, improving safety a lot.
- Pandora can still stream from her phone to the radio.