Hello everyone,
I’m thinking about a project and would like to ask for a second opinion from more experienced people. I sadly didn’t find a community dedicated to that on Lemmy and here’s the closest I know about. Let me know if I need to move the subject elsewhere, I understand this is on the fringe.
I have experience self-hosting many things on an old gaming PC at home.
Recently my phone which I use for music (navidrome) and satnav in car via Android Auto keeps crashing. The easiest solution would be to get a new phone but this one isn’t even two years old so I’m frustrated with modern tech and want to build my own satnav solution.
One limitation I have is that my car only has one USB port to benefit from the car audio system and infotainment. I’ve chosen to give the USB port to an MP3 player with my music on it.
My idea is to then get a Raspberry Pi 5 or something equivalent , probably the Pi for the community resources for the satnav system.
Add a GPS receiver to it, a generic phone screen, a few physical buttons, maybe bluetooth dongle to connect a bluetooth speaker and potentially a foldable keyboard to type addresses and install something like BRouter for local satnav. Try to figure out how to add physical buttons for media control and also manual brightness.
I’d power it with external powerbanks. The screen would be the size of a phone, or maybe even and old phone or something, to benefit from the third party market of phone holders.
The goal is relatively simple: Local offline satnav with rerouting. Full control of the data, updates and tech used. Portable so it easily comes with me from car to car over the years. Modular, so I could potentially add stuff like rear cam later on.
Why not get a dedicated GPS device? Because I don’t want to rely on a greedy corporations when I think I can do it myself (Garmin recently pulled a bad prank with a new subscription plan for instance.) And it’s simply just fun to attempt a project like this.
I have plenty of free time to learn and figure it out, but if there’s something obvious that I missed and makes the project a no-go, I’d love to know before I purchase everything.
Any feedback?
UPDATE 1st June: I’m going forward with the project. I’ve been looking extensively at how on Earth I am going to power this and the Raspberry Pi 5 isn’t a good contender because it requires 5V/5A which is very difficult to comply with in a car without tinkering that I deem advanced. I’m now considering using a Pi4. Checking if the 4 is strong enough for satnav and music.
You must log in or register to comment.
Its certainly doable, you just need to decide on where you want to start as a minimum viable product and tinker along as you go but ideally think far enough ahead about ideal situation so you don’t paint yourself into a corner and have to restart from scratch to get a certain outcome, although the Pi is pretty flexible for the power you’ll need.
I did this around 20 years ago (obviously not with a Pi back then) but as things changed I came round to the less hassle option of a phone and Bluetooth, particularly as I was often driving cars I couldn’t tinker with too much.
I had an implementation with a fold out 1 DIN touch screen which replaced the stereo and handled audio amplification etc and one with a stand alone hot plug 7" touchscreen. I had a reserve battery so that it stayed powered up for a short period of time after parking at home to do playlist and podcast synchronisation to my server in the house.
As other people have mentioned I was using Kodi and running audio from it as well as satnav etc. Mp3car was a good resource at the time.
I considered doing this a few months ago. I ultimately decided that for my use, it’s easy enough to just memorize the road network in my city, so I did that instead. This was the navigation software I was planning to use: https://github.com/navit-gps/navit
I love the idea and it’s something I thought about doing too, so I’m super interested in this thread.
For me, I thought it would be interesting to remove the existing stereo and mount everything it the double-DIN hole left behind. That would give you access to power, ignition, and speaker wires easily. You would need to do some rewiring between cars, but it would be the most practical spot.
From working on some fleet vehicles before, I’ve seen interesting systems where all of the accessories were on their own battery that only charged when the car was running or off an external charging cord that could be connected if it was going to sit for a while.
The benefit of a separate power system was that the equipment didn’t need to boot up every time you started the car. Maybe the display and anything else could be powered only when running, but if the main computer was always powered that would save time. It could also get a signal from a battery maintainer that the accessory battery is low and perform a graceful shutdown.
@Godnroc @Natal Something like this that you could flash a custom ROM on?
a.aliexpress.com/_EumxSoEThis is cool.
I have zero experience tinkering with cars so my first draft for power was simply a huge powerbank or two. In my use case, the device is meant for use when I drive alone, and when that’s the case it’s mostly very short trips of maximum 1 hour with standstill traffic, but more often than not max 30 minutes. Down the line I might improve the system and wire things more permanently but I need to build confidence first.
I was also looking at using the cigar plug for power, potentially, but I like the idea of a self sufficient, removable portable device.
One thing you need to consider is the temperature in your car. In the summer, the inside of a car could possibly get hot enough to damage the pi.
That was my first thought. How do you keep it cold enough to run in a place like Arizona, Spain, or Mexico? It also reminded me of my Windows Mobile days before I had a smartphone when someone on a Windows Mobile forum took a Dell Axim x51v and built a dock for it that exposed all the ports so he could use it with an external display as an infotainment/nav system. He called it the Aximizer. An old android phone with a micro-hdmi port might be the modern equivilant.
I had a Raspberry Pi2 in my car for a few years. The weather here in Barcelona is quite hot during summer, but even if it was left in the car under the sun, it always worked well.
I used it with the official Touch display, but added some physical buttons for navigation and playback as a touchscreen is never as good as real buttons, and anyway after some time, the touch function did stopped working well.
I used Kodi to play media, with a low resolution, “made for car” theme and using an addon to read the gpio buttons plus another one to make Kodi read only. The car adapter I used to supply power did not always trigger a clean shutdown, but having Kodi and most of the OS read only (i. e. no logs), I literally used the same SD card for years without any issue.
I could have used a gps as well (and launched its app from Kodi), but I got gifted a gps so used that.
Now I don’t need this as I changed car, but I still use occasionally the RPi2 with its screen as no matter what, they still work fine :)
Ultimately, I wanted to mention that more powerful boards will require even more watts and more stable power, so it might just be easier with an old board.
An old android phone with a micro-hdmi port
The last phone I saw with a micro HDMI port was the blackberry Z10 in 2013
Yeah, that’s one thing still on the drawing board. The reason my phone crashes seems to be thermal throttling due to heat buildup with use. That’s another reason I want to build my own device instead of buying one from some company, I can factor in the cooling and try to adapt to the hot environment better.
I would especially advise against relying on battery banks due to the heat, if you’re just going to use it in the car and already going to the trouble of customizing so much hardware I’d find a way to run a power supply off a switched 12v fuse or wire from the car - just convert to 5v/USB power. I’m sure there are generic kits online
Yeah that might end up being necessary, I haven’t found any easy solution to provide the 5A/5V required by a Pi5. Still pondering the power supply issue.
https://a.co/d/hh2N98y Something as simple as that, though I’m not sure 5v/3a is enough for a pi5 you’d have to check power specs
Thanks! I’ve studied this option and Pi5 needs 5A/5V. I haven’t found something adequate yet for that power requirement. So I’m actually considering going for a Pi4 instead.
I have a ~400 Wh powerbank in my car. It charges off the cigarette lighter when it needs charging and the engine is running. That greatly increases my ability to run higher loads on a short term basis, and gives me wall power. I can also haul it to a power plug and charge it if need be. It also lets me power a laptop if I’m parked.
I use my phone for navigation, and a mount for when I’m on longer trips.
I think that a Pi might make sense if you need something that a phone can’t do, more-intensive compute, but if a phone can handle it, it might be preferable, since you’re probably going to sporadically upgrade your phone anyway and probably have it with you.
The phone crashing is going to be a problem even for non-satnav use, so it might be worth replacing.
One thing I noticed was that my phone could overheat—at least in its case, haven’t tried removing it—if it continuously ran OSMAnd for navigation. That’d make it reboot. A quick and easy way to avoid the problem is just to toggle off the OSMAnd display. The satnav still works, and you get verbal prompts, just need a double-tap on the hamburger button or whatever to bring it back. Probably it’d be better to have a feature to throttle OSMAnd screen updates (reduce battery usage too) since I don’t need super-rapid redraw on a screen that I’m rarely looking at. Dunno if that might be what affects you.
That’s the thing, the phone never crashes otherwise. I don’t really use it anyway because I have zero use and interest for phones, it’s a device I have for 2FA, emergencies and satnav. My current one I bought 20 months ago at 230€. Fairly cheap, but not the cheapest either. In that short span of time, Waze had a total of 3 bad updates that forces me to go back to Google Maps until they patched it.
The whole reason behind the project is to get rid of the phone factor because it simply is unreliable. If not for the fun side of the project, I’d simply get an old school GPS that goes on the cigarette lighter.
I thought of a Pi because that’s the established brand, but if something else works just fine, then I might just go for it.
From some troubleshooting I made, apparently my phone heats up in the car because it automatically charges. The lower the battery, the harder it wants to charge and the more heats it generates. However, it doesn’t shed excess it fast enough so there’s a buildup until it crashes.
My car is, indeed, pretty hot. Getting a built device might solve it, or not, or temporarily until the device gets older, depending on the thermal management. Making my own device lets me handle it the way I see fit and go nuts on cooling if I want to.
I’ll take a look at the OSM screen update settings, that might actually help!
I’m rooting for you! Also because i wanna do this too!
Just in case this doesn’t work out for you, but you still want to tinker; your car puts out 12v from the cigarette lighter, and that’s a common voltage for computer-style fans. You could build a cooling rig for your phone? That’s definetly not as cool a project, but if it’s the øjne that ends up happening, it would still be a fun story to tell.
It’s very much a thing. https://getcrankshaft.com/
Almost, from my understanding of that page, you still need to plug a phone to mirror Auto. I want to remove the phone entirely from the equation, with local offline computing.
Technically there shouldn’t be any major problems with your plan.
I think you would have had an easier time finding information and support a couple years ago though. mp3car and similar forums would have been much more active. It seems like everyone’s just moved to using phones and the cloud at this point
Yeah, possibly, I might be a contrarian but I’m tired of cloud services, subscriptions, big corporations. I’m also tired of multipurpose devices that do plenty of things poorly. I just want a screen that shows me how to get somewhere, reliably. My phone from two years ago simply stopped being recognized by the car, bought a new one for that single purpose, and this fella already crashes too.
I didn’t go crazy on the budget but it worked initially and now it doesn’t at all so I’m tired of this bad tech. If I build my own, my hope is that I can make it more resilient and easier to repair/fix.
Oh I get it. I wasn’t trying to throw shade or discourage you. And I think the world of SBCs makes this a lot more doable than it was back then, but there may be less of a community to help than there once was though there are definitely still one-offs making it happen https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/diy-in-car-entertainment-display/.
I wish you the best of luck.
I didn’t take it as throwing shade :) I just thought I’d provide more context, though reading it back now it looks more like a rant.
Another person here pointed me to the Crankshaft too. It looks cool but it still uses a phone. I’ll try to erase this silicon slab from the equation entirely. From my personal experience over the years, phones have become a hindrance more than a supportive gadget.
I think i’ll go ahead and give it a try. I just need to figure out a way to cool the device properly in a hot environment.
I admittedly didn’t look super closely at the projects that have been linked, but my guess would be that the phone can be replaced with SW on the Pi. Something like volumio that was linked, or Navidrome for music.
Mapping was always kid of a mess when I looked at this kind of thing in the past, and I don’t think it has gotten any better.
If it’s the phone hardware you don’t like, rather than the software, there’s always LineageOS on a Pi (https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi5/LineageOS22/) as an option. Then you can still use whatever SW the phone would have had on it.
I am very interested in this as well.
I wonder if creating some kind of shared NixOS setup might work? (I know very little about NixOS but it seems like it should be good for this sort of thing?)
If you start down this road and set up a git repo or something, I would be interested in contributing/testing.
I also kinda like the idea of being able to slap other things into usb ports - dashcams, a usb stick with a good road trip mix, etc.
Yea you’re in the right place lol. Like others in this thread, ive also thought about this a lot.
I watched a video recently of someone using a pi for android auto: https://youtu.be/Puk_pzMGd7c
I think the only problem you’ll find is that the software would need to be more custom if you didn’t want to use Android auto. Some kind of customized launcher for the pi or something akin to that to mimic a infotainment system.
IMO, using a pi for android auto would be the easiest way to do this but totally get wanting to do it on your own.
I think as long as you use something like organic maps and have a GPS module, a pi should be able to at least do GPS. That said, I think you have to use downloaded maps in that case. I can’t say for sure but that’d be my best guess.
As for screens, my advice is just buy a screen from pi. I looked extensively for a screen that you can hook up to a pi with usb c or anything else and from what I saw, a lot of the options for touchscreens are worse and or more expensive than what pi offers at $65 and its about as plug and play as it gets since they built it.
In all I think its very doable hardware wise. Software would maybe be your only hurdle depending on how exactly you want this set up. If you wanna throw a couple weeks of work at it, I’d be interested to see it so def post again if you do.
You’d be better off getting a sub-$300 phone or tablet because this will cost way more than that easily, and without a battery, this is going to be a really shitty user experience.
The performance of a cheap mobile device will also be vastly better than a Pi device of any kind.
That’s the obvious route, indeed. But it’s not a fun one, I don’t get to own the data and the device is subject to poor updates which will render it useless in a few years. I’d rather buy an old GPS than buy a new phone honestly. The phone that is currently the culprit cost me 230, 23 months ago. It still works perfectly fine outside of the car for everything I need it for, it just doesn’t like being used in car. It’s too much for it I guess, though it wasn’t too much two years ago.
I considered a tablet, but I’m not sure if there’s a serious advantage over a phone at that point.
