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I have an old SoundDock from Bose. It’s the old model that does not work with new iPhones anymore so I can only use it with my old iPods. I decided to hack it and be able to connect any source of sound to it – especially the iMac. I had two choices: open it up, drill a hole and install an input jack, or get an iPod female dock connector and build a cable. The later seemed easier.

The connector is small and has 30 tiny pins. They are so tiny that it’s hard to count them. The pins to make the cable are:

1, 2 – Ground
3 – Line out R
4 – Line out L
18 – 3.3V (out)
19 – 12V firewire power (in)

The pins 1, 2, 3, and 4 are self-explanatory. Just connect the cable to those and the sound should be coming in. Should it? The SoundDock is not on all the time and in order to turn it on one needs to plug in an iPod. iPods provide 3.3V on pin 18 to power external devices which trigers the switch on the SoundDock.

In order to provide 3.3V on pin 18 I had to cheat and get it from the SoundDock itself. The SoundDock provides 12V on pin 19 to power and charge iPods. A pair of resistors is needed to divide the voltage to get 3.3V (or something around that number). I used 10k and 2.2k. They are connected in series. One side of 10k resistor is connected to pin 19. The middle (where 10k and 2.2k connect) is connected to pin 18. The other end of 2.2k is connected to pin 1 (the ground).

Since the pins are so tiny I decided to remove all except those I needed. I did not want to solder anything else my mistake. The resistors I used were 1/8W from RadioShack. And I used some glue to stabilize the cable. See the soldering work on this photo:

This is not pretty and will need some more glue or silicone, but it works.

Try it on your own risk!