To add to what Tony has said. Even if your Karma is plugged in to a switch, it will still see some traffic from emplode, which uses broadcast packets to find empegs. It won't respond, though.

As to the implied question: No, it's extremely unlikely that emplode will ever talk to the Karma. It'd be too much work. A more promising direction is to make Rio Music Manager talk to the car player, and to include whichever features of emplode that are missing from RMM. RMM is a much more solid piece of code.