The Raspberry Pi is one of the widely popular development boards and happens to be a wonderful platform for developers, makers and even beginners looking to explore the world of Computer programming and making. Thanks to its wide popularity, a lot of interesting projects have come to life running on this single board computer. Google’s Android Auto is the latest of such projects to be ported over to the Raspberry Pi thanks to an XDA Senior member f1x who has developed the OpenAuto project which is an open source Android Auto head unit emulator.
If you aren’t aware of what Android Auto is, it is a customized Android application designed for Vehicle dashboards to assist in navigation, entertainment etc with a UI that most Android users are familiar with. Android Auto comes as a feature on most new cars or as an optional accessory for the dashboard. Hence, if you wanted to enjoy Android Auto on older cars, you would have to settle with docking an Android phone or tablet to a holder in your car and installing the Android Auto app on it.
With OpenAuto however, anyone can build a permanent Android Auto based Dashboard for their vehicle with just a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Touchscreen display and make it worth your pre-existing audio system as well. The OpenAuto Project is currently in beta but it still packs in some incredible features at this stage-
- 480p, 720p and 1080p with 30 or 60 FPS
- RaspberryPI 3 hardware acceleration support to decode video stream (video stream up to 1080p@60)
- Audio playback from all audio channels (Media, System, and Speech)
- Audio input for voice commands
- Touchscreen and buttons input
- Bluetooth
- Automatic launch after device hotplug
- User-friendly settings
Apart from Raspberry Pi, OpenAuto also supports Linux in general and even Windows platform. If this has got you excited enough that you want to start building one right away, then head over to Github for the link and Open source code. We will try to bring out a build tutorial too, so stay tuned.
