carputer brainstorming ideas

- 2 minutes read - 392 words

As much as I enjoy driving, radio almost always annoys me. There’s a couple of particularly terrible stations and commercials around, but even the least objectionable of the pack really bother me. The focus did come with an auxiliary stereo input plug, which we have used extensively, but even that seems to have some shortcomings. In particular, one of the things I really miss about the radio approach is just that I don’t really need to think that much about it – it is just there while I’m driving around. Starting up spotify after I’ve started off isn’t safe or prudent.

I started thinking about ways to improve this, and I think I finally came up with a workable idea.

The plan is to use a raspberry pi wired to the electrical system and stereo auxiliary input. I think the Pi should start up fast enough to start playing music shortly after starting the car, and with an SD card loaded with music should have plenty to not get bored with. I also realized that if I used some program like MPD to handle the music playing, I could probably remote control it from the iphone. That might require another hack or two (like a Linux-compatible USB/WiFi or bluetooth network adapter), but it would be pretty awesome to have phones in the car able to select the music. The Pi is cheap enough that I could probably just hide it under the front seat in the car and not be very worried about it getting too hot/etc, and I could power it out of the 12V phone charger that I already plug in to charge my phone.

The other cool part about this is that if I ever manage to get my radio installed in the car, I can potentiaally use the Pi (or some other computing unit) to send APRS packets or whatever.

Anyway, the actual setup:

  1. Install Debian on the Pi, along with apt-get install mpd.
  2. Copy a bunch of music onto the Pi SD card, either directly or by scp-ing files over.
  3. Hook up the Pi to some speakers and troubleshoot the mpd installation.
  4. Move the Pi to the car.
  5. Ensure the wifi still works.

Next step will be running some machine learning analysis on the MPD play logs to see if I can build some really awesome playlists.