The remote control cable for a Kodak carousel projector arrived for the CitiCar today. I was able to confirm through others that the 5-Pin male plug would fit into my radios 5 pin female plug. Sure enough, I mated the two together and they had no problems.

The projector uses this plug with a remote control to control forward, reverse, and focus. The wires in the slide projector plug are only 22 AWG (0.65mm thick). This is because the projector used more voltage on some pins with less need for amps. I was questioning myself if the wires could handle the power that the radio needed to draw though them.

I pulled out my voltage meter and switched it over to measure continuity. I listened for a beep as I held one of the test leads on a wire, and tapped each pin on the plug.

The plug is fairly new and looks a bit modern. Each pin on the molded plug is numbered clearly. In addition, there is a little nub at the top to help keep track of what direction you are holding the plug in. This made it quite easy to map each color to a pin number. As for the car radio, I had previously used a red paint marker to mark the pin for power.

Pin	Color
1	Black
2	Red
3	White
4	Brown
5	Yellow

The next step was to plug it in and start identifying how the various colors were used in the radio. I quickly found out that the red and black wires mapped to the same colors on the radio for power and ground.

The radio only has four wires leading into its plug. The center pin is not connected to anything.

The speaker wires were a bit tricky to figure out. One of them wasn’t working at all. I tried swapping the speakers with each other to determine if the speaker was still working, or perhaps I didn’t have a good connection.

It turned out that instead of a bad speaker, or failing to wire it up properly, the radio itself wasn’t sending a signal. Using the radios balance knob, I was able to determine that the radio wasn’t sending anything over the green wire to the right speaker. The grey wire was for the left speaker.

Projector	Remote Color	Pin	Radio Color	Function
Focus	Black	1	Black	Ground
Forward	Red	2	Red	Power
Reverse	White	3	Grey	Left Speaker Positive
Rack solenoid	Brown	4	Green	Right Speaker Positive
Ground	Yellow	5	(none)

I traced the green wire inside of the radio, which turned into a thin orange wire that went to a circuit board. From here I ran along the trace until I came to a electrolytic capacitor. I’ve often heard tales where others have had to replace capacitors to get things to work. I decided it was time to stop.

The next time I focus on the radio, I’ll screw the left speaker into two separate RCA screw terminal adapters. This will let me wire it up to the CitiCars left and right speaker from the same channel for a mono sound. I’ll also replace the wires on the projector plug with something thicker. It feels like a potential fire hazard.

Products

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INNOVA 3320 Auto-Ranging Digital Multimeter

8-TRACK AM Vintage car audio RADIO original