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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
