Hello everyone,
I’m thinking about a project and would like to ask for a second opinion from more experienced people. I sadly didn’t find a community dedicated to that on Lemmy and here’s the closest I know about. Let me know if I need to move the subject elsewhere, I understand this is on the fringe.
I have experience self-hosting many things on an old gaming PC at home.
Recently my phone which I use for music (navidrome) and satnav in car via Android Auto keeps crashing. The easiest solution would be to get a new phone but this one isn’t even two years old so I’m frustrated with modern tech and want to build my own satnav solution.
One limitation I have is that my car only has one USB port to benefit from the car audio system and infotainment. I’ve chosen to give the USB port to an MP3 player with my music on it.
My idea is to then get a Raspberry Pi 5 or something equivalent , probably the Pi for the community resources for the satnav system.
Add a GPS receiver to it, a generic phone screen, a few physical buttons, maybe bluetooth dongle to connect a bluetooth speaker and potentially a foldable keyboard to type addresses and install something like BRouter for local satnav. Try to figure out how to add physical buttons for media control and also manual brightness.
I’d power it with external powerbanks. The screen would be the size of a phone, or maybe even and old phone or something, to benefit from the third party market of phone holders.
The goal is relatively simple: Local offline satnav with rerouting. Full control of the data, updates and tech used. Portable so it easily comes with me from car to car over the years. Modular, so I could potentially add stuff like rear cam later on.
Why not get a dedicated GPS device? Because I don’t want to rely on a greedy corporations when I think I can do it myself (Garmin recently pulled a bad prank with a new subscription plan for instance.) And it’s simply just fun to attempt a project like this.
I have plenty of free time to learn and figure it out, but if there’s something obvious that I missed and makes the project a no-go, I’d love to know before I purchase everything.
Any feedback?
UPDATE 1st June: I’m going forward with the project. I’ve been looking extensively at how on Earth I am going to power this and the Raspberry Pi 5 isn’t a good contender because it requires 5V/5A which is very difficult to comply with in a car without tinkering that I deem advanced. I’m now considering using a Pi4. Checking if the 4 is strong enough for satnav and music.
I have a ~400 Wh powerbank in my car. It charges off the cigarette lighter when it needs charging and the engine is running. That greatly increases my ability to run higher loads on a short term basis, and gives me wall power. I can also haul it to a power plug and charge it if need be. It also lets me power a laptop if I’m parked.
I use my phone for navigation, and a mount for when I’m on longer trips.
I think that a Pi might make sense if you need something that a phone can’t do, more-intensive compute, but if a phone can handle it, it might be preferable, since you’re probably going to sporadically upgrade your phone anyway and probably have it with you.
The phone crashing is going to be a problem even for non-satnav use, so it might be worth replacing.
One thing I noticed was that my phone could overheat—at least in its case, haven’t tried removing it—if it continuously ran OSMAnd for navigation. That’d make it reboot. A quick and easy way to avoid the problem is just to toggle off the OSMAnd display. The satnav still works, and you get verbal prompts, just need a double-tap on the hamburger button or whatever to bring it back. Probably it’d be better to have a feature to throttle OSMAnd screen updates (reduce battery usage too) since I don’t need super-rapid redraw on a screen that I’m rarely looking at. Dunno if that might be what affects you.
That’s the thing, the phone never crashes otherwise. I don’t really use it anyway because I have zero use and interest for phones, it’s a device I have for 2FA, emergencies and satnav. My current one I bought 20 months ago at 230€. Fairly cheap, but not the cheapest either. In that short span of time, Waze had a total of 3 bad updates that forces me to go back to Google Maps until they patched it.
The whole reason behind the project is to get rid of the phone factor because it simply is unreliable. If not for the fun side of the project, I’d simply get an old school GPS that goes on the cigarette lighter.
I thought of a Pi because that’s the established brand, but if something else works just fine, then I might just go for it.
From some troubleshooting I made, apparently my phone heats up in the car because it automatically charges. The lower the battery, the harder it wants to charge and the more heats it generates. However, it doesn’t shed excess it fast enough so there’s a buildup until it crashes.
My car is, indeed, pretty hot. Getting a built device might solve it, or not, or temporarily until the device gets older, depending on the thermal management. Making my own device lets me handle it the way I see fit and go nuts on cooling if I want to.
I’ll take a look at the OSM screen update settings, that might actually help!
I’m rooting for you! Also because i wanna do this too!
Just in case this doesn’t work out for you, but you still want to tinker; your car puts out 12v from the cigarette lighter, and that’s a common voltage for computer-style fans. You could build a cooling rig for your phone? That’s definetly not as cool a project, but if it’s the øjne that ends up happening, it would still be a fun story to tell.