Another thing broken: From one day to the other, a crackling noise, then silence, and then I could not use the hands-free set (HFS) in the car any longer. No loss, this was a crappy little thing with a built-in loudspeaker that never worked very well.

I had modified the simple system to connect it to a "line-in" port of the navigation system via a "line-in" to "radio frequency" converter, but there was a problem: The output level of the HFS was of course not with respect to ground (your typical push-pull amplifier) but was a current driver for the loadspeaker. As such, when I first connected it to the "line-in" port, the HFS did not work. As a dirty fix, I only grabbed  one of the pins of the loudspeaker and connected them to the line-in port and used the car's  chassis as ground potential. This resulted in crackling and hum, but it kind of worked, and I was able to make phone calls. And with many things that do somehow work, I lived with the solution for quite a while. Now the thing was broken, and it was time to clean up the mess!

I decided on a parrot HFS system very quickly. But how to connect it to my carminat 2+ navigation system? I poked around the internet for a while, even asked a "professional" to put the system in for me, but was shocked by the amount of money the guy wanted to charge me. Turns out that only few people have this navigation system in their cars. Wikipedia states that it is a faster successor of the carminat 2 system that some people have... Anyway, while there are some discussions about "carminat" and HSF's, there is no information about the pin assignments of the carminat 2+ to be found on the internet.

Finally, I tried to just have a go and solve all problems on the way myself. First, I purchased a parrot MKI 9100 system. This system has ISO connectors and has a small enough display to fit into the shelf under the head-unit of the navigation system. I then unplugged the connectors from the radio, added the cables for the parrot, and put everything together without thinking much.  And guess what? It worked! Probably the reason why nobody wrote about the carminat 2+ on the internet is that the system has standard connectors that accomodate the parrot system without problem! Okay, there were three minor things: the mute connector needed to be wired correctly (Pin 3 is the correct one) and the power and ignition line needed to be exchanged  (this is described in the parrot manual, and both cables have fuse holders, so this was easy). Also, when I fired up the carminat 2+ again, I was asked for the security code (and I had to go to my friendly Renault Dealer to look it up for me). All in all it was about 15 minutes of work, plus another hour to put wires nicely into the right places, mount the microphone above the rear-view mirror and to mount the display onto the shelf.

Altogether, this was a cake-walk. Still, if you try to do the same thing and you kill your expensive carminat 2+ system, don't come crying to me...