Need a second opinion on a project idea (Pi5 car headunit)
-
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.
-
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'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.
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 -
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. -
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.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
-
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.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.
-
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 specswrote on last edited by [email protected]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 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.
