What happens when a radio guy with a Jeep and a Raspberry Pi decides factory dashboards are too boring? You get PiCar — a DIY car radio replacement with a VFD display, a couple of knobs, and a whole lot of hacker soul.
Built around RTL-SDR and Raspberry Pi, PiCar does AM/FM, GPS nav, CAN bus snooping, 1-wire sensors, and even streams tunes from your iPhone — all without draining your Jeep’s battery. It's not just a head unit, it's a rolling testbed for software-defined radio, CAN hacking, and embedded Linux audio.
Features
VFD display to match the existing decor.
Simple user interface, maybe just two knobs.
Radio based on RTL-SDR software radio.
4 speaker audio (I am too old to care about subwoofers)
Allow me to play audio from my iPhone
Access to Jeep and GM CAN networks.
GPS receiver.
External temperature sensor
Power management (don’t drain my battery)
A clock that I don’t have to keep setting.
Articles
Most of the story is documented under the PiCar - Raspberry Pi Car Radio Project:
Part 1 - Why would anyone sane do this?
Part 2 - The Hardware.
Part 3 - 1-wire temperature sensors
Part 4 - An overview of the Software
Part 5 - GPS, or where the heck are we?
Part 6 - Can you hear me now? - Raspberry Pi Audio.
Part 7 - Software Defined Radio.
Part 8 - Who ate all the CPU?
Part 9 - Play that funky music ...
In addition, I talk about the various pieces of hardware I constructed:
Rings and Knobs - Rotary encoder and LED rings
Power Management part 1 - Safe shutoff switch
Power Management part 2 - Turning on the Radio
A few articles about talking to the CAN bus and Hacking your Car Network
Part 1 - ODB vs CAN bus,
Part 2 - Connecting Raspberry Pi to CAN
Part 3 - Reverse Engineering CAN packets
Part 4 - Writing code to talk to CAN
Part 5 - ODB and older cars
This post fits into the bigger picture of what I write about.
For the broader mission—start here: Independence: built from code, steel, and stubbornness.