Apple Carplay/Pioneer sph-da120 Problems

As of July 15th 2015 pioneer has released firmware 1.09 on their site. For some reason after following the instructions my firmware update button is grayed out and I can't update. Here is the link. http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Car/AppRadio/AppRadio+4+(SPH-DA120)

The update (1.09) is currently ONLY available for the United States and Canada. Do NOT update, if you bought your device elsewhere!

I'm having the same trouble and I bought mine in the U.S.. Does anyone have any tips?

you have to have the parking brake on or make sure its wired.

cliffpd, thank you so much. It was easy, once the emergency brake was pulled, it installed like butter(smoothe). Thanks so much!

Hi!
I bought mine in Germany and I'm unsure about installing this update. Where did you get you information about the region restrictions besides the Pioneer web site stating this? I'm pretty sure Pioneer posted the same text with 1.07 last year - and that did work for me. There has always just been just one firmware file in the downloads section at a time, so how are users outside the US and Canada supposed to get "their" updates?
Pls. let me know if you have more insight to this.
Thanks from Hamburg / Germany
Detlef

Bullet #3 resolved my issue, thanks a lot!

Carplay on my DA120 is nearly useless. Today on a 20 minute drive it dropped out of carplay 3 times. I have no idea why. It will just lose the connection to the iphone. to restore it, i need to turn av off then on on the pioneer and then unplug and replug my iphone. then, it will work for a few minutes and drop again. I'll see if any of the solutions here help, but i suspect i'll end up returning the unit

Hi!

I also just got the SPH-DA120 and had the problem that it would recognize the iPhone as connected but would do any CarPlay. What helped was connecting the iPhone to the Lightning at USB1-Port before starting the power/car at all. If I connect my iPhone before starting/giving power to the radio everything works just fine.

Maybe that helped?

cheers

was having the same problem, i think i fixed mine it working back to the way it was. try turning on siri on if you haven't got it on already. then if that doesnt work you can just go to the setting on the pioneer system, and reset all settings to get it to factory set up then that would get if work 100%.

I also had consistent issues with the connection dropping. After much frustration, I have finally solved it.

For me, if I have an active VPN connection (using VPN Unlimited - haven't tested other VPNs), I get consistent drop outs as described above (guaranteed within 5-10 minutes). If I do not use VPN, all remains well.

I have passed this on to VPN Unlimited who suspect some incompatibility between Carplay and VPN and told me they will investigate. Not sure if this reflects an issue with VPN Unlimited or VPN in general.

I use an Alpine ILX-700.

Deleting the VPN and Onavo Also cured it for me....annoyingly when i was testing it outside my house it was working perfectly (as it was on the wifi not the VPN) when i drove away the trouble returned

I am also suffering CarPlay disconnects on my SPH-DA120 with my iPhone 6s. I am under the impression that things have gotten a lot worse since I updated the iPhone to iOS 9.3.1. It now rarely stays working more than 20-30 minutes. Sometimes it will fail in just a few minutes, once worked fine for over 3 hours just after that. Very odd. The issue also affects my partner's iPhone (an iPhone 6, also on 9.3.1)

I have updated the SPH-DA120 to FW 1.11 but am not seeing any difference to the issue.

What's happening?

While using carplay (maps or even just music playing) the SPH-DA120 out of the blue will issue a short "beep" as if i had pressed a key. At the same time the screen goes black for a few moments, then the source selection shows that there's no USB device connected.

After this, neither the iPhone nor any other USB devices will be recognised anymore, also not on USB port 2.

To reconnect I need to turn off the car and restart it, thus restarting the SPH-DA120.

I do have two VPNs configured on my iPhone, but they were not connected or in use when these connections drop happened.

Say, I hope this is not too off-topic, but how did you upgrade the firmware SPH-DA120? I formatted a USB thumb drive as MS-Dos (Fat) with Master boot record scheme. Copied the AVIC5000NEX folder to it as the only thing in the thumb drive root directory, but I still get a some sort of read error when trying to upgrade the firmware. Got any tips?

That's exactly how I did it, except that here it worked. Maybe try an different drive