Carputer Project

[viperguy]

well since i had a spare $7 laying around I decided to put my trust in the internet and bought the exact steering wheel remote pictured above off Ali Express....so I guess updates to come once it arrives.

Edited March 14, 2017 by viperguy

[RAYDEO]

so much fail on photobuckets behalf.... sad times.

[viperguy]

Wellity wellity wellity....since I can never let anything go, I've finally achieved my ultimate goal now that technology has caught up with my vision.

 

Probably not a thing for people these days with Android head-units being a dime a dozen, but here's what the breakdown of what a modern carputer is for me now and why I've gone this way (mainly just enjoying a project and being a cheap bastard):

 

- Raspberry Pi 5 running Lineage OS 21 (Android 15), overclocked to 2900Mhz

- Raspberry Pi active cooler

- Raspberry Pi NVME Hat with 512GB drive

- USB/HDMI 7" touchscreen, silicone sealed into factory double-din spot

- USB GPS receiver

- USB DAC with optical output to DSP

- Power control is via a bit of dedicated hardware (probably detailed earlier in the thread) which provides power on/off control with ignition sensing, also tells the Pi to cleanly shutdown via USB

- A nifty gadget I found that provides USB signal pass-through from source to sink, whilst also injecting fast-charge USB-C power to my phone

 

So, what this lets me do is basically have the full-blown unrestricted Android experience in my car with the main benefits:

- Offline maps and navigation via google maps

- Playback of any and all media up to the limits of the storage capacity via VLC, BS Player, Plex, etc (choose your favourite), and maintaining great quality to the sound system via a fully digital/optical signal path directly into my DSP

- Android Auto via the "Headunit Reloaded" app (wireless function is buggy as hell but wired is solid, and with the gadget I mentioned above, I get fast-charging anyways). There is also a standalone function, so Android Auto without a phone if you wanted to.

- Anything else is just limited by my imagination, but main focus was fully offline and standalone media playback and mapping functions

 

Few learnings/additional tweaks:

- Since I've been collecting music videos etc for years, my collection contains a wide range of resolutions/codecs, not all of which are guaranteed to be supported on low-powered platforms (especially modern 4K60 AV1 files). I run a service on my server that detects file additions to my media libraries (relevent to the carputer) and copies/converts these to 1080p30 HEVC/H265 which the Pi5 can process on GPU, these then get transferred to a "Carputer media" folder that gets automatically synced over wifi to the carputer (installed a WAP in the garage to facilitate this).

- Audio files just get synced directly in the same way

 

So yeah, pretty much it really...

 

 

Edited December 30, 2024 by viperguy

[Gripless]

Don’t forget pi3 runs link ecu dash amd there is now support for canbus so you can log or react to car events.

[Timmah]

On 31/12/2024 at 11:37 AM, viperguy said:

Wellity wellity wellity....since I can never let anything go, I've finally achieved my ultimate goal now that technology has caught up with my vision.

 

Probably not a thing for people these days with Android head-units being a dime a dozen, but here's what the breakdown of what a modern carputer is for me now and why I've gone this way (mainly just enjoying a project and being a cheap bastard):

 

- Raspberry Pi 5 running Lineage OS 21 (Android 15), overclocked to 2900Mhz

- Raspberry Pi active cooler

- Raspberry Pi NVME Hat with 512GB drive

- USB/HDMI 7" touchscreen, silicone sealed into factory double-din spot

- USB GPS receiver

- USB DAC with optical output to DSP

- Power control is via a bit of dedicated hardware (probably detailed earlier in the thread) which provides power on/off control with ignition sensing, also tells the Pi to cleanly shutdown via USB

- A nifty gadget I found that provides USB signal pass-through from source to sink, whilst also injecting fast-charge USB-C power to my phone

 

So, what this lets me do is basically have the full-blown unrestricted Android experience in my car with the main benefits:

- Offline maps and navigation via google maps

- Playback of any and all media up to the limits of the storage capacity via VLC, BS Player, Plex, etc (choose your favourite), and maintaining great quality to the sound system via a fully digital/optical signal path directly into my DSP

- Android Auto via the "Headunit Reloaded" app (wireless function is buggy as hell but wired is solid, and with the gadget I mentioned above, I get fast-charging anyways). There is also a standalone function, so Android Auto without a phone if you wanted to.

- Anything else is just limited by my imagination, but main focus was fully offline and standalone media playback and mapping functions

 

Few learnings/additional tweaks:

- Since I've been collecting music videos etc for years, my collection contains a wide range of resolutions/codecs, not all of which are guaranteed to be supported on low-powered platforms (especially modern 4K60 AV1 files). I run a service on my server that detects file additions to my media libraries (relevent to the carputer) and copies/converts these to 1080p30 HEVC/H265 which the Pi5 can process on GPU, these then get transferred to a "Carputer media" folder that gets automatically synced over wifi to the carputer (installed a WAP in the garage to facilitate this).

- Audio files just get synced directly in the same way

 

So yeah, pretty much it really...

 

 

Don;'t suppose you'd be able to chuck up some photos at some point?

 

I have a Pi4 kicking about doing not a lot, lack a lot brain cells, but I wonder if I could wrangle together something for my WRX, with some chatgpt help