In the early 00’s I started messing around with creating a custom head unit for my Jeep Cherokee (XJ). The idea was to have something that could handle music playback and mapping — not unlike what is available today. There were commercial offerings at that time but being a big, nerdy, DIY guy I wanted to build my own system.
I purchased some hardware and went to it:
- VIA EPIA M10000 Mini-ITX motherboard
- laptop hard drive
- 8" 1024x800 screen with touchscreen that I forget the brand
- Garmin serial GPS puck
- A tiny case with small PSU
For the operating system I was using Gentoo Linux. The desktop was X11, audio was ALSA, and the window manager was FVWM.
I used FVWM’s ability to create button bars to control the hardware via shell scripts underneath. The audio mixer was a html page. FVWM button bars were able to “swallow” apps and display them in the button bar so that is how apps were handled and displayed.
GQMPEG was used for the player, GPSDrive was used for mapping. Both are now dead projects as best I can tell.
I got pretty far with it and it kinda worked well enough as a prototype for the most part. The next step was to get serious about writing a bespoke GUI for it.
And then the first iPhone came out. I could see that as a one-man-show there was no way I was going to be able to create something as usable as a $5 dollar app on the app store. The writing was on the wall in a way. I wasn’t thinking of ‘productization’ or anything like that — I was being protective of how I used my time. So I stopped developing it and moved on to other projects.
If I knew then that the future was going to be composed of a privacy invasive hellscape of bad actors trying track your every move in your car and on the go I would have kept iterating the project.
A few times over the recent past I’ve looked back at it and even gone as far as to prototype some elements of this type of system using Raspberry Pi’s and RPi controllers to turn CAN Bus stuff into a local area network to drive screens with data and whatnot. I may get into it again — and build a system that is private, bespoke, and vintage & classic car friendly.
Thanks for reading.