Mod Details

PremiumYes Difficulty Mod ID1174 Creditevilution Cost££5+ For Linkhttps://www.evilution.co.uk/mod/decode-the-grundig-cd-stereo.htm Copy to Clipboard

I Don’t Know My Stereo Code

This is becoming more common now. Cars are being sold on and the code cards are getting lost. You could own the car for years before requiring the code. By that time, the code card is very lost. Your original options were to contact smart, jump through hoops to prove that you owned the car and the stereo and then pay about £25 for them to contact Grundig so they could look up your code on their list of serial numbers.

Or

Send your radio off to a radio decoder, spend £10 in postage and £20+ having the stereo code calculated.

Or

Take your stereo to a stereo decoder and pay for it to be decoded.

Can’t The Code Be Found Online?

Nope. Unlike many other stereos, the security code could not be calculated by the serial number.

Shall I Just Try…

0000 or 1234 just in case? No. No stereo left the factory with codes like this and the code cannot be changed so someone before has not changed it to something easy.

So, I Take It That There Is Now Another Option

Do it yourself of course. I bought a fortwo Grundig CD player without a known code.

Before the morning was finished, I knew the code and the CD player was working.

Currently I only know how to do the CD player in the 450 fortwo and 452 Roadster.

Hexadecimal Code Dumps

Before doing this, I had never read a microchip but it turned out to be easy when you know the details. You’ll need a laptop, a chip reader and a chip clip but this will be covered later on. No soldering required. First we need to open the stereo to get to the chips.

Once you remove the 2x Torx9 screws on the top, the cover can be levered off from the back edge.

Once inside, you’ll find 4x Torx9 screws holding the CD carriage in place. Remove these.

The CD carriage can now be flipped to the side…

…and the ribbon cable disconnected by pulling the 2 tabs down and then pulling the cable out.

The CD carriage will now be clear of the stereo main unit.