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.

  • Stefano PrennaAEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    I had a Raspberry Pi2 in my car for a few years. The weather here in Barcelona is quite hot during summer, but even if it was left in the car under the sun, it always worked well.

    I used it with the official Touch display, but added some physical buttons for navigation and playback as a touchscreen is never as good as real buttons, and anyway after some time, the touch function did stopped working well.

    I used Kodi to play media, with a low resolution, “made for car” theme and using an addon to read the gpio buttons plus another one to make Kodi read only. The car adapter I used to supply power did not always trigger a clean shutdown, but having Kodi and most of the OS read only (i. e. no logs), I literally used the same SD card for years without any issue.

    I could have used a gps as well (and launched its app from Kodi), but I got gifted a gps so used that.

    Now I don’t need this as I changed car, but I still use occasionally the RPi2 with its screen as no matter what, they still work fine :)

    Ultimately, I wanted to mention that more powerful boards will require even more watts and more stable power, so it might just be easier with an old board.