Updating the Becker Cascade navigation filesystem

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).