Thread: Steering Wheel button controls

I own a Scion xA 2006 and am in the planning stage of installing a carputer. I want to keep the functionality of the steering wheel controls to control StreetDeck. The only way i've thought of doing this so far is using a voltmeter to find the two corresponding wires at the back of my stock deck to each of the five buttons (volume up, volume down/track up/track down/mode) and then soldering those wires to the two contacts on each button on a board from a usb game controller. This game controller would have to have drivers capable of emulating a keyboard. I would make use of StreetDecks keyboard shortcuts so that the buttons on the steering wheel would hit the matching shortcut to do what it used to do with my deck. My first question is whether anyone has a better idea as to how to connect my buttons to the carputer. Also, I have heard that all the buttons actually just connect to two wires and send different voltages to represent which button is being pressed, which would make my wire to usb controller theory invalid. If this is the case, maybe I could buy one of those converters that allow the steering wheel buttons be used with kenwood, sony, blaupunkt, etc. stereo systems, although i do not know if they convert the two wire system into seperate wires. Another problem arises with the functionality of the buttons, currently the volume up and down upon pressing and releasing add 1 or decrease 1 to the volume, if either one is held it keeps increasing or decreasing the volume, i tried pressing, and holding the keyboard shortcuts in StreetDeck and they respond the same way, so those two buttons are fine... however, the track up and down on my factory stereo when held, do not change tracks, but switch albums. And the mode button when pressed toggles through each mode, lol, such as FM, AM, CD, XM, and Aux. When it's held it turns off the stereo system. If it's off, when you push mode, it'll turn it on. I was thinking of having the track up/down and mode keys acting like emulated keys that aren't used by Streetdeck, and then having a program recognize based on how long it is being pressed to judge if it's being held or not, and then send out an emulated keyboard shortcut to StreetDeck. As for the mode button, the program could keep track of what the last mode was and go through a series of shorcuts for each main fuction of StreetDeck, such as Music, GPS, Internet, etc. So any further ideas, complications you can see, or more explanation as to how things work or could work, let me know. thanks!