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.
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.