This is for the community who might ask how to get a tablet setup in their car.
Before I used to run a seperate android tablet that sat infront of my cluster. I’ve used both the Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite 8.7" and also the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 10.5".
Both worked fine, no issues with the app. I decided to look into non tablet setups due to the issue of heat and battery expanding. I live in SoCal desert area and my Tab A7 did start to expand in heat.
If the car is mostly garaged, like when I ran my S4 tablet, I did NOT have that issue.
Now, onto connections. I have not worked with canbus or hardwire options so don’t ask me directly for that. Hardwire I believe “theonegauge” can help you with that. From what I remember they tap into the wire behind the clusters, read the voltage and from the you tell which is which depending on the voltage change. Yes they have their own prebuilt clusters but that I believe does not use realdash. Just dropping their name, you’d have to contact them to discuss more their product.
Now, back to something new.
I have found a way to run a Raspberry Pi 5 in my car.
It is running an android verison.
Please follow the instructions there if you want to install it. It’s clear enough in my opinion. Do remeber that after install gapps to wife AND factory reset. I say this becuase without doing this you can NOT get google asisst to speak for you. This is very important if you use the action “Speak Text”.
Here is the raspberry Pi i bought, no I didnt’ use the case:
This is the fan I used. Yes you need a fan. It worked perfectly thorughtout winter/spring. But after temps of 80°F outside, it would shut down on me. Once I installed a fan that issue went away:
Here is the screen, I do run the 10.1" but it’s slightly too big for my dash. I can’t see the whole screen, so their 7" might be a better chose for most.
So why no case?
I don’t believe the case works if you mount it behind the screen, which I do have that setup. That and if you plan to add an SSD or more, I don’t believe that case would work.
Doesn’t the Pi product also come with a fan?
Yes the product does include it’s own fan, but I removed it after installing it by accident. Also couldn’t reinstall due to having to cut the clips to remove it. The one listed comes with screws, a lot friendlier to uninstall and replace imo.
From that screen, again the Pi is mounted behind it. I don’t use the legs of the screen.
You do need the usb to pin for touch.
Yes the screen will turn on with that, BUT it had power issues with RealDash. Whenever speak text would want to work, aka using speakers, the screeen would go black during the time sequence of spoken text. They do provide the 3 GPIO cable to power the scren, installing that would fix the isuse. I did not have any real screen issues NOT running the cable without speaker useage.
Ribbon hdmi cable does work, but their ribbon cable was kind of shitty with me moving it around. Yes i still move my dash around daily and the new cable doesnt give issue.
This ribbon replacement has been working for me BUT i could not do mini hdmi to ribbon. I had to do mini hdmi to hdmi and start using the HDMI port on the side.
Now, does the Raspberry Pi stay on the whole time?
Yes it does.
Does the screen stay on the whole time?
No it doesn’t. I power it off manually to save power.
Do the speakers work?
Yes they work perfectly but again, install gapps correctly for speak text and also make sure to use the 3 pin GPIO to avoid issues with power and the screen.
Does it kill my car battery?
Yes and no. During spring I’ve had no issues. Maybe if i left the car parked for more then 3/4 days I might have that issue of battery drainage. I did start to have issues during summer. The 2 variable changes are: I installed the fan AND technically I got a bad battery I need to replace. So once I replace the battery I’ll get back to you on that. Early summer I didn’t have any battery dying issues, so I suspect it’s mostly my battery.
My driving habbits are 4+ hours of driving for 5-6 days a week.
The device itself runs smoothly if everything is installed correctly.
Now biggeest part, how do i power it? I know this has been asked in other forums and no answers asidr from using a PSD usb outlet. I went a different route.
I used this device, which is no longer listed but you can find similar devices. Main reason, is that the raspberry pi needs to run 5V and 3A minimum. This device does 5V 5A which is no harm especially as you plan to run the display and in the future possibly other equipment as cellular, gps, etc.
Once this was installed I’ve had great powering. I used a fuse tap on the red side and just grounded the black as it was.
A product similar to this. I had a few around home and I did not solder them, I wire crimped it. I use a 5A fuse btw. You can either tap into a hot fuse, one that is always on for the car. Or tap into a cold? fuse, one that turns off when the keys turn off. I do not know how well the boot time is. Nothing crazy but definetely not take off friendly. Also I don’t know if the sudden cut to power would affect the sd card of the Pi.
So the whole setup i give an S+ me personally. It works great, sound and speak text works. It’s exactly like my tablet just no battery.
What issues do I have?
Currently only 2 known.
First, if you restart or cold start the device. Boot times aside, I noticed that the app will constantly crash. No, I haven’t figure out why. @realdashdev I don’t know if you guys want to invest time into this setup to find out. I just noticed that if i cut power compeletely and hard restart the device the app will open and then close eventually. It’ll do so a lot early on but as time goes by, the time between the app randomly closing gets larger like hours apart. I don’t believe memory issue as I’ve used 4 gb of ram before. Nor do I think its directly an app issue as on my tablets I never experieced this. Maybe its something faulty with this android version, but I don’t have the experiece to try and figure it out. I don’t believ power issue as the device never turns off the screen or anthing else. The app just closes on its own and you have to wait a few seconds to reopen it. If you attempt to reopen it too fast the app won’t open.
Second, no map data. Now, I admit I have no GPS module for the raspberry PI. Nor do I remember if my preivous attempts worked, by this i mean previous installations of the android system as I’ve clean installed a few good times to get this working to this point. Currently the device on RealDash is stuck in Europe? and does not change. This means GPS functions are essentially disabled. Sorry, no weather, GPS speeed, etc. I am confused by this, as the device is connected to internet when driving. I use a mobile hotspot. If i open Google Maps and have it check my location, it does take a few seconds but will give me my exact location. With that said, I don’t know why RealDash isn’t pulling my location via internet. This one I think @realdashdev can solve easily hopefully.
So that’s it so far. Maybe tomorrow after work I can get pictures of how the pi is setup so you can see what cables i use and how they are installed if you plan to use the same screen setup.
This is one of the OBD2 devices I use in my cars. Works perfectly fine. Heads up though, not all cars read data the same speed. My accord which ran from 2003 - 2007 had a noticeble 1-2 second lag on gauge readings. So definetely can’t use an OBD2 setup in that car. But switching the device to my 2006 - 2011 civic or my 2008 - 2014 tsx I had no lag issues and it works fine. I believe this comes down to what hardware they used for the ECU. So I recomend checking when you car’s generation starts, and preferably having the start year be after 2006.
I believe this should’ve covered everything. I will try to be active again. I do plan to redo my dash design tutorial and go a bit deeper into that one. That will take time and is not a one day to other post.
Hardware wise, I hopes this helps the community out. If anyone is on the android forum for pi, let them know about this as the step down converter was a huge game of chance as I haven’t seen any other posts talk about using one. I mostly seen using a PD outlet and PD cable to run PI but again I didn’t want to do that. I don’t like visible outlets, that’s jsut me.