Hardware design and code for Raspberry Pi based car entertainment device. Everything is up and running and works fairly well at this point. I wrote a blog post that summarizes the project.
The wiki has complete information on building the device and installing the software.
Everything (software and hardware) is open source: see the file LICENSES.txt for details.
The basic idea is being able to play videos and music from the Raspberry Pi. The user interface consists of a 2.2" LCD and 6 keyswitches. A sandwich-style enclosure consisting of two pieces of laser-cut acrylic and various bits of hardware has been designed and assembled. The "enclosure" directory has complete CAD drawings.
Here is a photo of the assembled device (with the Raspberry Pi, the LCD module, and the keyswitches):
Current status of the software is
- It's a console (ncurses) app. This probably won't change, although the software makes a clean separation between controllers and views, and the former are completely independent of the latter, so a proper GUI interface could be supported.
- The LCD display is assumed to be 240x320, accessed as a Linux framebuffer device with fbcons. (Specifically, an SPI-based LCD using the ILI9340 controller chip, supported by fbtft using the "adafruit22a" driver. Note that the LCD I'm using isn't specifically the Adafruit one, but appears to be completely compatible.) With a 8x16 font this gives us a 30x20 text display.
- Music playing works using mpg321 and ogg123 via the remote control interface (actually ogg123 playback doesn't work, need to investigate this).
- Pushbutton input is supported using the RPi's GPIO.
- Video playing is supported by running omxplayer as a subprocess, with video output going to the composite output (because composite video monitors for cars are super cheap).