Updating the Becker Cascade navigation filesystem

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have a Becker Traffic Pro 7949 car audio and navigation system in my LHD Renault Twingo mk1. This unit, effectively a re-badged Becker Cascade with a green OLED screen rather than colour, was bundled with high-end sports cars of German and Italian origin, but I added one to my lowly Twingo because it’s a 1DIN headunit with great sound quality, navigation and music support from CF card, that gives spoken and on-screen turn-by-turn directions!

Even today the interface is rock solid and obvious, and the turn-by-turn directions pack a lot of information on screen. Below we can see (clockwise from top right): menu marker, ETA, distance to next turn as number and as shaded road edge, turn-by-turn arrow, traffic message control badge, remaining journey time, current road and next road.

A while ago I hacked the CF card structure to allow use of larger capacity cards to more easily store maps and music side-by-side. Good times!

Upgrading maps

The maps for this thing were long discontinued, but for a while users such as myself were able to use maps made for BMW’s business fleet (with partial postcode search) and more recently Mercedes-Benz (with no postcode search).

It’s also possible to add speed limit and camera data through injecting a new .lwd file (thanks SCDB!) into the split ISO filesystem. This relied on using Windows and some old apps.

Today I wrote a small shell script to do the same on macOS (and probably Linux, maybe Windows).

Hacking the Becker Cascade navigation CF card

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I just had my tonsils removed and whilst recovering at home I decided to try to figure out how I could use larger CF cards in my Becker Traffic Pro 7949 car audio and navigation system, a close relative to the Becker Cascade.

The unit came with maps on a 2GB card which is barely big enough for the maps, leaving not much room for MP3 files. Later map distributions increased the size of the card to 4GB as the map quality increased, but still not much room remaining for music.

Let’s go bigger

I bought a new CF card of the same type (SanDisk), opting for a SanDisk Ultra 8GB, and copied the files and volume name over. It didn’t work.

Next, I cloned the smaller card onto the larger card and that worked! Then I expanded the size of the partition and it stopped working.

What’s going on?

Partition Magic

At the time I had a ThinkPad laptop with a built in CF reader. This allowed me to look at the card contents at a device/block level rather than the filesystem level. I noticed that there was the usual space after the main partition, and low and behold what did I see at the start of that “unused” space? Some magic text!

HARMANBECKER BECKER V4

I even figured out the magic text for Ferrari branded units with the assistance of a helpful owner.

HARMANBECKER FERRARI V4

The version number would be increased in step with any updates to the system software.

By partitioning a SanDisk card and giving it the same file contents, volume name, and this magic text made the upgrade work. For a while I sold these modified cards on eBay for a nice little markup and it kept me in video games for a while. Good times!

Get Info: #becker

Updating the Becker Cascade navigation filesystem

Upgrading maps

Hacking the Becker Cascade navigation CF card

Let’s go bigger

Partition Magic