While I was at EMFCamp this year, one of my friends gave me a Pioneer AVH-X8700BT head unit for my van. The cool thing with that radio is it will do Apple CarPlay which is useful since I am currently an Apple user. My current setup is a bluetooth audio adapter kludged into the back of the stock head unit, this new to me head unit lets me connect my iPhone SE to it via a lightning cable.
Sadly, when I powered it up on my desk, I found it was password protected and the hint wasn't any use. Asking my friend what the password was got nowhere, he couldn't remember, any guesses he came up with didn't work.
So it sat around for a week or so while I was at work. Until I had a look around the internet and came across a random forum post for a different radio. Not the same one as mine but I figured I would have a go, the radio was free so if it failed then nothing lost.
I grabbed the RAR from the Dropbox link (mirror) and dumped the contents to a freshly formatted 16GB pendrive, plugged it in the top USB port and powered on the radio. It sat at the password screen for a few seconds then rebooted into maintenance mode. From there it was simple to hit the factory reset option in the menu, remove the pendrive and power cycle the head unit to the language selection screen.
Fantastic! From there I plugged the phone in, set the radio to work with Apple devices and had CarPlay running, controlling my phone from the head unit. Much better than faffing with a bluetooth puck on the dash.
This fix may work for other Pioneer radios from the same family, the link above is for the AVH-4000 but worked just the same.
