[TriEmbed] More information about Crankshaft - DIY Android Auto

[Huan Truong]

Hello everyone,


Thanks for your feedback and encouragements today. I'm really
flattered and humbled by how positive and engaged everyone was in this
silly project of mine. I just didn't have any resources or links and
there are things that might have been lost in communication due to the
impromptu show-and-tell nature and perhaps my not-so-good English. So
I thought for anyone who wants to try out, I'd leave some more tips:

- The software is called Crankshaft, and the web page is
http://getcrankshaft.com/, its github is
github.com/htruong/crankshaft. It's a Free software, GNU/Linux, GPLv3
licensed and is basically Raspbian Lite with a bit of fluff on it. It
does various tweaks on top of another piece of reverse-engineering
software called OpenAuto and aasdk by Michal Swaz (github.com/f1xpl).
One of the first goal is to make a baseline distro that works out of
the box (and safe, and doesn't kill your car battery). The second goal
is to encourage the end-users to further work on and develop on and
make cool custom car setups. So I did everything I could to encourage
every user to crack open that package to tweak it however you like.

- The detailed BOM if you want to build it is on the main page ->
click on the green Get Started button. Basically, you need a Pi of any
gen (but preferably at least 2 USB ports), the official screen, a case
or you can 3D print your own case, and a USB microphone. Everything
should be around $100-$150. You can add GPIOs to it to do various
things (details on the wiki).

- You can borrow a raspberry pi kit with a touchscreen from the NCSU
library to test, although I don't think it works as well as the
official screen. If you have a monitor screen and a Pi of any sort
that is laying around that you want to try out to make sure it works
with your phone before committing to it, you can try to follow this
wiki entry:

https://github.com/htruong/crankshaft/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Questions

If you have a car project in mind, this is probably one easy project
you can finish in a weekend in a couple of hours or so. I really hope
that some of us with older cars will find it useful as a
"made-in-Raleigh" distro. The goal of my life is to rival Redhat as
the #1 Linux distro provider in Raleigh... no, I'm just kidding.


- Huan.



-- 

Huan Truong
grad student
www tnhh.net / twitter @huant