RISC OS in the car

I thought some of you may be interested in my current project to fit RISC OS in to my car.

I’ve been a big fan of the os, from playing with a borrowed BBC B, to my electron and finally an ARC 440 and always harbored an ambition to have it in my dream car. Luckily I’ve got pretty cheap tastes so I bought the car ( a 1992 landrover defender) a couple of years ago and have spent the past few weekends fitting it out for a computer.

It’s pretty standard stuff with a raspberry pi connected to a cheap monitor and an audio amp all stuffed in to a home made central console, with room for the landy goodies like the winch controls and vacuum rear diff etc.

RISC OS really plays to it’s strength’s as a car computer – really quick to start up and shut down and it doesn’t complain about having the power cut. It’s also great with the low res monitor and worked with the wireless keyboard without any real issues – you can’t beat the reassuring “beep” of an acorn booting through the speakers when you flip the switch!

I was using !amplay to run the music however I’ve had a few issues with it so switched to DigitalCD for the time being. Eventually I want to create my own interface (styled to look like the old elite HUD) with hooks in to !amplay and taking readings from the gpio pins.

I’ve used a lot of other peoples work to get this to happen – from risc os itself through all those responsible for !amplay, digitalCD and bapfish.org to CJE micros for the hardware, so I’d just like to thank you all for inadvertantly helping me out – cheers!

I’ve a bit more info here:http://garysshed.co.uk/wp/?cat=24 if anyone is interested.

Sorry – I’m a bit new to this! – link is here

Well done Gary. Great to see our bits doing something a bit off the beaten track!
I’m intrigued as to why you mounted the display upside down?
Of course with a Pi its so easy to rotate the output so it is very easily sorted.

Winning hack!

Chris – it looks like there are buttons on the display. Maybe mounting it upside down made these buttons more accessible?

Cheers Chris & Rick – I’ve mounted it upside down following some online advice (I think from the comments page on Amazon)….
When it is the right way up it gives quite a washed out look to the picture but when it is put in upside down it looks a lot better – I imagine its to do with the backlight position but the change was really noticable especially when viewed from the drivers seat. The screen has a button to rotate it and it remembers the setting which is handy.

You might be interested in ROUGOL’s meeting on 21st October as Michael Emerton will be showing CarDJ which is an mp3 player with his own a custom interface.

http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/

He will also be exhibiting at the London Show, just five days later!

http://www.riscoslondonshow.co.uk/

I don’t think he has a website at the moment.

Awesome hackery. Now you just need a better UI than the RO desktop…

Having said that, I’m not convinced about touchscreen UIs in cars. I think they’re a very bad idea unless designed very cleverly, and common functionality should always be implemented using physical controls (that can be found, distinguished and operated without looking).

Thanks for the link, Bryan.
The show is an achievable distance away so sounds like an interesting place to go and discuss CarDJ. The interface is something that I’m particularly interested in so it’s reassuring that someone else has got a decent version running.

The version I’m using is a bit of a bodge together of things currently. The controls for the player require precision mouse control with the little keyboard / mouse combo – as you mention nemo, ease of control to maximise concentration on the road is paramount, so fiddling with a tiny keyboard is not a great idea – especially in a vehicle not known for its handling!!

The risc / pi combination has reignited my teenage hobbies of programming and electronics so I’m hoping to come up with some sort of control method, both physically and visually, thats easy to use and a bit of fun. It’s a long term project (as I’m coming at the programming element from a very basic level and I want to enjoy it) so current ideas include using the old elite HUD screen and some ADC’s connected to the GPIO pins to display the fuel, temp etc in real time. Possibly with a spinng wire frame version of the landrover in place of the old cobra! – currently it doesn’t have shields or a laser fitted so I can use these read outs for something else (until they arrive).

There is some space beneath the screen for buttons so I’m also thinking about having the basic functions that were so handy in tape & CD players built in to control the player via the GPIO pins (e.g. stop, play, fast forward etc.). I’m not a fan of touch screens at all and would really like to avoid using one if possible – I’m also well used to the old tape controls so they seem logical & second nature to me!

Thanks again for your support and comments.