Raspberry Pi Into BP5 Legacy Build Thread

[syphe]

I thought I\'d post about a project I\'ve started to integrate a car PC into my Legacy. I don\'t normally post projects like this but can\'t really find many others that have done the same so thought I\'d put my build up here to help inspire others.

This will all be happening in my 2003 BP5 Legacy GT. When I bought it, it didn\'t have the Nav screen installed but instead the wee cubby door in the center vent area.

My requirements are

* Turn by Turn GPS

* Integrated into Cubby

* Reverse Camera Input

* Audio Output to head unit

And some nice to haves

* OBD2 connection for metrics

* Bluetooth integration with head unit / hands free connection

* iPod control

My current setup is a Clarion CX501 head unit I ordered from Amazon a year ago, it\'s a simple double-din head unit which has bluetooth hands free, ipod/usb input and all the other usual features. The 2 issues I have with it are:

* no rear USB input

* bluetooth mic is part of the unit, and being a US unit means it is aimed at the passenger rather than the driver which makes it hard to understand me sometimes when on hands free.

My last plan was to install a Nexus 7 in the cubby area, I bought a Nav bezel from a wrecker which is the OEM bezel with the buttons at the bottom, had to cut the vents to fit the tablet and got everything mounted and working.

This solved many of my requirements, however had a few problems.

* The nav bezel I had was not an exact fit for a 7 inch screen, and as such the bottom of the tablet couldn\'t be seen or used.

* I bike to work a lot of the time so without making a concious effort to take the car out to charge the tablet, it would slowly discharge itself and turn off completely, requiring 20mins of charging before being able to power on.

* I actually really like using the Nexus 7 as a tablet itself, so short of buying a 2nd it spent more time inside than in the car.

Instead, I figured why not try and use the Raspberry Pi I\'ve had sitting around doing nothing for a while.

For those that haven\'t heard of this little bit of kit, it\'s basically a matchbox size computer which has HDMI output, and some other basic functionality.

more here: www.raspberrypi.org

In the past I had this setup as a media centre in my kitchen, but have since replaced it with an Ouya to do the same thing, so for the past year and a bit it\'s been sitting gathering dust.

In order to satisfy my requirements I\'d have to get a few extra bits in order to do various things, as well as all the gear to get it running in my car.

Currently I have

* OEM Nav Bezel with 6.5" screen opening. (Looks like this: http://legacygt.com/forums/showthread.php/fs-wa-complete-factory-navigation-system-bezel-84220.html)

* Raspberry Pi

Parts I need

* Powered USB Hub (This is to provide extra USB ports, powered so it doesn\'t draw power from the raspberry pi).

* USB GPS Receiver

* 6.5" HDMI TouchScreen

* Reversing Camera

So far I\'ve ordered the following

Digitus 7 Port USB 2.0 Powered Hub

This hub was fairly cheap at about $20, apparently may not be very reliable but can always replace with something better at a later date.

12V 170° Mini Color CCD Reverse Backup Car Front Rear View Camera Night Vision

Cheap Camera from ebay, cost about $15 shipped from China.

Columbus V-800 USB GPS Receiver -- 66ch MTKII WAAS 5Hz

Had to find a GPS receiver that works with the Raspberry Pi, this was at the top of the list at http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#USB_GPS_devices and was a decent price so I picked one up from ebay for around $45.

HDMI+VGA+2AV+Driver Controller Board+6.5" AT065TN14 LCD Screen 800*480

Finally a touch screen.

This was a bit hard to find as most people are after 7" touch screens which fit snug in double din locations, but because I was using the factory OEM bezel which only houses a 6.5" screen, I had to find something different.

Eventually found this one, which should fit perfectly according to the specs.

Key features I needed were the HDMI input and reversing camera input.

I\'m already part underway, I have the raspberry pi booting up with XBMC and running off a 4.3 inch non touch screen and powered from the USB hub mentioned above. I\'ll take some pics and maybe a video of it in action over the weekend.

[syphe]

literally 10mins after posting this thread my reversing camera arrives

Looks good, nice and small think it will look the part under the boot handle in the wagon.

Looks like I\'ll be playing around with this in the weekend making sure it works and maybe if I have some time can snake the cables around the car to get it installed

[bobbyjimmy]

Keen to see how this turns out.

Have a part number/link to the touchscreen?

[syphe]

touchscreen part number is: AT065TN14

if you search on ebay there are loads of them for sale, just sort by lowest price + shipping should get some around $73 from top rated sellers.

The GPS dongle arrived today, so plugged that in and sorting out packages for that at the moment.

reversing camera works fine too.

will get all the bits I have connected and put up a vid of it in action soon.

[taylerreed94]

This is cool! I ended up getting the stock stereo unit out and replacing it with a dash facia for double Din and seperate AC controls then put in a 7" touch screen JVC with built in Bluetooth and GPS. It came with a reverse camera so I mounted it slightly to the right of the handle as my mount wouldn\'t let me sneak it behind the handle.

By the way if your rear door is anything like my 06 legacy they are a major ball bag to get apart and practically impossible to poke a wire through. Good luck! Can\'t wait to see progress!

[syphe]

Got the reverse camera mounted in the rear hatch, will post a pic up tonight.

You were right, it\'s a major pita. I found some instructions in a pdf (I\'ll post link up to that tonight also) for removing the trim in the hatch, but some of the clips in the trim were just so brittle after 10 years they were impossible to remove without breaking.

I ended up drilling a hole behind the licence plate illumination lights, then taped up the wire with a bit of vac tube and electrical tape to form a seal, so should be sufficiently waterproof, if water ever manages to get under the licence plate lights.

In the end that was the only hole I needed to drill, I snaked the cable in the gap behind the illumination light so no holes that can be seen from the outside, then just attached the camera using some interior self adhesive tape to the underside of the hatch handle, that\'ll do for now until I can get the screen in place and adjust the angle to suit.

Weekend\'s job is to snake the cable between the hatch and the roof and hide the cable in the interior.

[syphe]

Ok, Got a few things done now.

Got the Raspberry Pi loaded with raspbmc, which is a media centre install I use elsewhere in the house, it\'s very good at what it does, and with a few tweaks will be a perfect touch interface.

It\'s all hooked up to a tv screen for now while testing, as soon as the touchscreen arrives I\'ll hook it up and get it running.

Also got Navit loaded onto the Pi, Navit is an open source mapping and navigation software for many platforms. It uses OpenStreetMap (can use other sources) as sources for map data, and I have loaded it up with South Island maps so far.

After a few tweaks to Navit I\'ve got it working very nicely, and along with the GPS dongle I purchased it gets a lock very quickly.

Onto the reversing camera, it\'s all installed for now, this is the camera mounted under the hatch handle

I didn\'t have too many problems getting it installed, mainly just issues with the clips holding the trim in the rear hatch were very brittle, and broke a few so had to use some double sided adhesive to get them to hold a bit better.

I routed the cable for the camera under the rear left pillar trim and into the gromet between the hatch and body.

It was pretty easy getting the cable through the gromet, I simply taped the cable onto a screwdriver using electrical tape and threaded the driver through the flexible gromet thing until I could remove the tape and pull the cable through.

Once I had the cable through the gromet, I simply removed the rear left pillar trim with a bit of force, then pulled down the roof trim a bit so I could get access to the other side of the gromet.

Once I had access I simply pushed through some of the cable and routed it down through the pillar trim.

At this point I re-assembled all the panels that I had taken apart including the rear pillar trim, I have softly routed the camera cable around the rear passenger seat and under the carpets and it\'s now sitting under the front passenger carpet ready for use.

At some point I\'ll try and hide it a bit more out of sight but it\'s fine for now in case I need to move things around, and besides you can\'t even see the cable unless you peel up the carpets.

[taylerreed94]

If "Norrie Street" on your pic is anything to go buy, you live less than a kilometre from me, looks great!

[kamineko]

cool

is the power supply for the pi robust enough for an automotive application?

[syphe]

 taylerreed94 said:

If "Norrie Street" on your pic is anything to go buy, you live less than a kilometre from me, looks great!

heh, that pic was before a tweak I made to have it zoom in closer to the street, so thought it was safe to post, doesn\'t show my *exact* location.

cheers.

Power supply should be ok, need 5v at about 3amps at most, others have done similar things and supposedly the pi can be left on using the 12v constant without draining the battery too much.

At this stage I\'m going to have it power on and off each time the car does, but may put a wee battery in the circuit at some point to allow it to be permanently on standby (within reason).

[kamineko]

sorry i should have been more specific, automotive environments are not nice places, electronically speaking. there is a lot of electrical noise that microcontrollers don\'t like

[syphe]

aah I see, well I\'ll soon find out. I haven\'t bought any gear to provide power for the pi in the car yet, so may have a few testing nights ahead of me to get things sorted.

One thing that may trip me up is I was planning on only providing power to the usb hub and let it backfeed to the pi, this is how I\'ve got it setup while it\'s inside for testing, however there is no surge protection when power is backfed to the pi so will probably have to give both the hub and pi power seperately.

do you think i\'d need to filter the 12v acc line coming in?

[taylerreed94]

Ahhh, well if you ever need a hand pm me. Letter ally just round the corner

[mattapo]

we use a ground snake and run the camera wiring down the roof lining, really easy

[syphe]

 taylerreed94 said:

Ahhh, well if you ever need a hand pm me. Letter ally just round the corner

cheers mate, will let you know if I need a second pair of hands, feel free to give me a PM if you just wanna take a look in person how things are going too.

Screen finally arrived a couple days ago, so gave it a test connected to the raspberry pi as these pictures show:

Unfortunately I missed a detail in the ebay listing for the screen and failed to order the more expensive unit with built in digitizer for touch input.

Luckily these things are all fairly barebones parts and can be purchased seperately, so immediately I bought a matching digitizer and a converter board for taking the digitizer output and pushing it to usb, only cost around $10 each so not too much of a blunder.

For a trial I have got the screen taped securely to the back of the faschia and sitting in the cubby area hooked up to the reverse camera, will take a few more pics next time i\'m in the car for this.

Seems to work well, the ccd camera has good detail, but haven\'t tried it in the dark just yet.

Also need to get a 12v to 5v step down converter to power the usb hub, most of them I can see only provide about 3 amps, however the hub is 3.5amps, I think I should be ok but to be safe I\'ll just try to avoid loading up the hub with too many thirsty devices.

[syphe]

Just went and picked up an OEM nav screen from the wreckers, $56 including.

I got it with the plan on ripping out the buttons for connecting to the pi, but I\'m gonna try use the whole unit.

Looks like it should help with keeping everything secure, I\'ll take it apart and hopefully the screen will fit in without too much forcefullness.

Also the rear of the unit should be a good place to secure all the ports I need for reverse camera and such.

[syphe]

Test fit into the car, fits really nicely, looks factory.

Still just the reversing camera installed at the moment, waiting on a voltage regulator before I can install the pi, but we\'re getting there.

[syphe]

a few more bits and pieces arrived yesterday.

got a second lcd screen, decided that the 6.5" screen was too small after seeing the factory unit was a 7" screen with some underscan. 7" screen almost identical to the 6.5" screen was purchased from eBay and arrived smartly a week or 2 later.

Also the 12V to 5V down converter arrived, connected it up to a strip connector thing (at the top of the photo below) temporarily, I expect vibrations will loosen the connectors so this is only temporary while I\'m getting things sorted.

Plugged it in to the wall with a 12V power supply, checked with the multimeter and sure enough got 12V to the down converter and 5V from the converter.

Got the screen all connected, and thought I may try out to see whether my wee usb digitizer control unit works with the factory digitizer, to my suprise I plugged it in and a few seconds later tapped on the screen and saw a mouse cursor appear. The calibrations a bit munted at the moment, and the axis is around the wrong way, but at least it works and means the digitizer will fit perfectly in the surround YAY.

Here\'s a picture of it all working with a bunch of crap lying around.

This morning I took a detour on my cycle and while dripping with sweat picked up a couple of barrel jacks from jaycar to make my power leads for the screen board and usb hub. Tonight I\'ll try to solder these up and with a bit of luck I\'ll have everything enclosed and working off a single 2.5mm barrel jack for power for easy plug and play.

[killervq30de]

 syphe said:

Test fit into the car, fits really nicely, looks factory.

Still just the reversing camera installed at the moment, waiting on a voltage regulator before I can install the pi, but we\'re getting there.

Couple of questions where did you pickup your double din fascia from? And are you still able yo steering wheel controls some how?

[gotasuby]

Facia you can import from avo jdm. Yes you can still use factory steering wheel controls if you get a interface.

[Andy_Mac]

Been considering one of the avojdm ones too, but that price.....

Damn they're pricey

[sobanoodle]

 Andy_Mac said:

Been considering one of the avojdm ones too, but that price.....

Damn they're pricey

Still the cheapest around plus they have all the different versions i.e dual climate. There was one on trademe, single climate. Another possible option is converting the top storage compartment (above the trip comp if you don't have a monitor there) to 1-din bracket, avojdm have them for around a hundred.

[syphe]

I think I got mine from japanparts, but yeah, similarly pricey.

also, have not forgotten about this project, so may as well provide a quick update.

I have replaced the screen with a 7 inch unit which fills the bezel leaving no gaps. the unit is all sitting in place at the moment, with an hdmi cable, 5v, and the usb touchscreen cable routed into the glovebox.

I had the raspberry pi all setup for a number of weeks, however pulled it out to make a few modifications.

- losing power to the pi meant things would not be saved to the sd card, so have bought a little circuit which will allow it to shutdown gracefully, this just arrived, so will hope to get it all wired in on the weekend.

- adding a wifi dongle to host a wifi AP, planning on using this to cast my android screen, will post up a video when I have some results

[carlito1979]

Hey man this is a cool project - have you had any more progress since July?

[syphe]

it's all in the car working, turns on and displays the navigation app and turns off gracefully when the car turns off.

When I get a chance I'll get out there and take some pics and videos of it working.

Still got a wee bit of tidy up to do, the screen has slipped down a wee bit so is on a bit of an angle haha, but it's all working each day I get in the car.