Skip to main content

Featured Post

Product Design of a 4 wheel differential drive robot

Post a Comment

Raspberry pi based Car Infotainment system



Out in the market, there are a handful of car infotainment systems that you can buy for 10 to 30k INR. But nothing beats the thrill of making one from scratch and put it on your own car. So this is my effort to make one from the scratch.

At heart, it is a raspberry pi 3 Model B single board computer. For those who don't know about raspberry pi, it is a single board compute with a Quad Core 1.2GHz Broadcom BCM2837 64bit CPU with on board WiFi and Bluetooth. See this for a complete spec. It is connected with a 7 inch multi touch display running Ubuntu Mate (a Linux variant). Os is modified so that it is only running the bare minimum services to run the system. It will save the boot up time and improve performance a little bit. It is connected to a GPS module via UART to get current location. It is used in the navigation section. It is also used to get time, when the device is not connected to internet. It uses google map API for navigation.

The complete infotainment system is build using nwjs (see link for a full description). It is an html + js + css + nodejs framework in which you can create cool independent apps using web technologies. There are famous apps that are built using these framework like atom editor, github-desktop (using electronjs but similar framework).

Hardware Info:
  • Quad Core 1.2GHz Broadcom BCM2837 64bit CPU
  • ublox neo-6m GPS module
  • 7 inch Multi Touch Display
  • JBL mini speaker
Software features
  • Real time Navigation system with GPS
  • Mean Sea Level Altitude info
  • Music player
  • YouTube player
  • Google Map Location sharing to see friends/family in real time in the map
  • Intuitive on screen keyboard
  • Fast boot time (15 s)
This video will show you the complete UI. It is a simulated setup to show all the options.


This video will show the whole system working in the actual hardware.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plymouth theme for Ubuntu

Bored of having the same boot animation screen again and again? There are plenty of Plymouth themes available out there. This is a theme I created by slicing some cool gif files I found online. You can download the theme and find the installation steps on my github account. ( https://github.com/krishnan793/PlymouthTheme-Cat )  The theme is created for Ubuntu 16.04. But this can be installed on previous versions with slight modification. If you have a slow computer then you can watch the whole animation loops. (The VM I used to record the screen was fast though. :))
Post a Comment
Read more

Getting started with GPIO (Testing GPIO with a multimeter)

There are 65 possible GPIO pins that you can control. Some of the GPIO pins are normally configured to different functions. Let's play with one of them. Go to the beaglebone website and figure out the header pin corresponding to gpio23. The gpio23 is mapped to the 13th header pin. In this tutorial we are testing the gpio23 output using a multimeter (Do not connect an LED directly to BBB IO pin). First go to following directory cd /sys/class/gpio / Then make gpio23 available echo 23 > export A new directory will be created. Open gpio directory. cd gpio23 The direction of IO will be normally set as in (input).  To make it as output, echo out > direction Then set the pin to high using echo 1 > value Measure the voltage at pin 13 of P8 header. If its 3.3 V then you are on the right track. Pin 1 and 2 will be ground. You can connect the negative terminal of multimeter to pin 1 or 2. To set output as zero, echo 0 > value After finished wit...
Post a Comment
Read more

Serial Port Communication in Linux using Minicom

First of all install minicom using apt-get install minicom or directly download the .deb package from  https://packages.debian.org/sid/minicom  and install it using dpkg -i <package name> After install type minicom -s to setup the minicom for using your serial port. Select Serial Port Setup and type A to select serial device. It will be shown as /dev/modem replace modem with  your serial device. Press Enter twice to save. You can also setup boadrate and all those stuff in the Serial Port Setup. After that you can save your configurations. Select Save Setup as. Then type a name and press enter to save it. If you wan't to open your configuration later, type minicom <configuration name>
Post a Comment
Read more