I am having some connectivity issues with my 2015 JKUHR and would appreciate some help from anyone that can offer it........
I have a NVIDIA Shield Android 5.1.1 tablet and Bluetooth OBDII adapter. My goal is to pair the tablet with both the OBDII adapter for use with Torque and UConnect to stream music to my 130N head unit....
Here is what happens...
I successfully paired the tablet with the OBDII adapter once and it has been working flawlessly since. I successfully pair the tablet with UConnect and it works fine along with the ODBII BT... meaning Torque works and I can stream music.. so the tablet IS capable of communicating to two different BT devices.....
This works fine until they are disconnected for any reason... i.e. Jeep is turned off, tablet is turned off, etc.... After the Jeep and tablet are back on, they will not reconnect. "UConnect" is visible in the tablet's BT config.. and if I go and "list" the paired devices via voice command in UConnect, the tablet is there... The only "cure" -- if you want to call it that... is to delete the tablet from UConnect and UConnect from the tablet and re-pair them... At this point, the process repeats itself.
The OBDII BT on the other hand, reconnects flawlessly every single time....
I can't be the first to have this issue..... Anyone else? Thanks in advance!!!
Just as you said.... no phone, no Uconnect connection. The procedure above to force the tablet to connect as an "audio device" worked fine, however. Still.... simply having the phone with me -- which I always do -- is the easiest thing. Problem sort-of solved.
Now all I need to do is wire a jumper in the TIMP to supply full time power to the 12v outlet on the dash so my tablet doesn't keep dying when I leave it overnight-and-then-some. That one I can figure out myself... LOL.... Found an always-hot unused connector and I just got in a mini-fuse tap and a pigtail from Amazon. Will be tackling that tonight.
Anyways... back to BT... that's pretty piss-poor software design.... It would have been nothing for Uconnect to see which devices support what among "hands free", "phone audio" and "music audio" and connect accordingly. Just goes to show how bad car companies are at this sort of thing. See the various "Hacking the CAN bus" threads elsewhere for more on this.
Well... I did the test with the 2015 Subaru Outback and, unlike the Jeep, everything worked as expected...
1. Un-paired GF's phone to where the was nothing paired with BT in her car. Turned off BT on her phone -- just in case.
2. Paired my tablet - -same one used in Jeep. All worked as expected.
3. Turned off vehicle and physically removed tablet out of range -- just in case something remained alive even when vehicle off...
4. Waited 1/2 hour, returned tablet to vehicle and fired up the engine.
5. Subaru's BT recognized tablet and connected with it. Display on car indicated it had re-connected with an "audio only" device. This is a different message than is displayed when her phone is paired and present. All worked as expected.
The behavior above is exactly what I would expect. Wrangler's BT implementation definitely has a bug which requires the device at Priority 1 to be a phone with a Hands-free profile. I am calling Uconnect tech support and will ask them what they know and if they intend to address this.
I hate to say it, but don't expect much from that call. I tried calling twice to ask them when BT streaming audio issues with iOS 8.2 (which shipped in March) and later would be fixed, both agents told me to keep checking the website every so often for an update, and to use an AUX cable in the meantime.
My advice? Buy an aftermarket HU from a MFR who understands Bluetooth better. If I can stream audio via BT to a cheap adapter or other (quite old) speakers for hours at a time without a hiccup, but Uconnect can't handle it, it's pretty clear that FCA's incapable of getting BT right at a basic level, and you're just going to be frustrated by what you're trying to do.
The basic Uconnect will be under going less and less updates as well as feature support. Some issues that people are having would require expensive HW changes and I highly doubt that this will happen. Especially with the birth of Uconnect Assist. The issue with a slight skip when streaming audio from an IPhone has to do with the clock speed that Apple has hose to use. Uconnect has used the same HW for a few years and is compatible with all other phones. So with an issue like this only being with Apple, then it doesn't rank as high as if it were with Apple and a few others. Apple believes that they are the ones to conform to instead of them working with others. They know the clock speed of the crystal used in Uconnect and chose to use a higher speed causing an issue. This isn't a matter of FCA understanding BT, its a matter of Apple wanting to be special. Granted that your less expensive items may work with Apple products, this may be because they were designed recently and have a higher clock speed crystal on their circuit board. In order for the suppliers of Uconnect to make the change, there would be great expense for HW supplier testing, R&D, validation process, and then the release. Pretty much because Apple is the only company that is having this issue (which is their decision) then the cost to fix it should also be on them.
The fact that cheap devices made years ago and other auto manufacturers can get it right show that it's absolutely possible. If FCA can't ship a product that works with current devices, that's either poor design, or lack of desire to test/update. Either way, unacceptable.
I've given up on it and am moving on to one that somehow manages to make it work. I'd suggest others do the same and avoid the frustration.
If Apple is operating within the specs of BT, they're not doing anything wrong. If they're not, that's different.
The fact is that it's not unilaterally broken for all BT devices, nor even all Uconnect systems.
People update their phones more frequently than they do their vehicles, so the fact that Uconnect doesn't work correctly on day one with current devices shows pretty poor design choices on FCA's part. If a vehicle sold in 2008 doesn't work with a phone released in 2015, that's one thing. I'm talking about a new 2015 vehicle and an older phone.
They have the same access to Apple's developer programs as anyone else, so they also have the ability to see if something's coming in the next OS release that may not work well, and even provide feedback on something they feel is broken. They're selling a product that is marketed to work with people's smartphones, so it's up to them to do their best to do just that.
Other manufacturers can get it right, so there's no excuse FCA can't.
Just got off the phone with Uconnect. They fully acknowledge being aware of the tablet issue I posted above. They also do not see it as an "issue" because they say they do not explicitly support any BT devices that do not have a hands-free profile.
Basically the guy said.. if the tablet works at all, great.... You may have problems here and there, and if you do... oh well!
When I mentioned to him that the Wrangler is the only vehicle out of three with this issue that I personally checked (Ford, Chevy, Subaru), he told me he would pass it on to the engineering team. He said there are no plans that he's aware of to support anything but phones with hands-free profiles.
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