Raspberry pi based Car Infotainment system
11 Mar 2018Out in the market, there are a handful of car infotainment systems that you can buy for 10 to 30k INR. But nothing beats the thrill of making one from scratch and put it on your own car. So this is my effort to make one from the scratch.
At heart, it is a raspberry pi 3 Model B single board computer. For those who don’t know about raspberry pi, it is a single board compute with a Quad Core 1.2GHz Broadcom BCM2837 64bit CPU with on board WiFi and Bluetooth. See this for a complete spec. It is connected with a 7 inch multi touch display running Ubuntu Mate (a Linux variant). Os is modified so that it is only running the bare minimum services to run the system. It will save the boot up time and improve performance a little bit. It is connected to a GPS module via UART to get current location. It is used in the navigation section. It is also used to get time, when the device is not connected to internet. It uses google map API for navigation.
The complete infotainment system is build using nwjs (see link for a full description). It is an html + js + css + nodejs framework in which you can create cool independent apps using web technologies. There are famous apps that are built using these framework like atom editor, github-desktop (using electronjs but similar framework).
Hardware Info:
- Quad Core 1.2GHz Broadcom BCM2837 64bit CPU
- ublox neo-6m GPS module
- 7 inch Multi Touch Display
- JBL mini speaker
Software features
- Real time Navigation system with GPS
- Mean Sea Level Altitude info
- Music player
- YouTube player
- Google Map Location sharing to see friends/family in real time in the map
- Intuitive on screen keyboard
- Fast boot time (15 s)
This video will show you the complete UI. It is a simulated setup to show all the options.
This video will show the whole system working in the actual hardware.