Putting a Real Need for Speed Mini Map in a Car

One feature that has become almost ubiquitous in video games is the mini map in the corner of the screen. That is incredibly useful in virtual worlds and it would be useful in the real world, too. You can achieve something similar by using your smartphone or car’s infotainment system to display a map, but that won’t look right. So, Garage Tinkering created a real Need for Speed-style mini map for his Nissan 350Z.

Physically, this is just a small round screen that goes on the car’s dash and displays a mini map of the current location. Graphically, that mini map looks like what is in the Need for Speed games.

The hardware is minimal and at the heart is a Waveshare ESP32-P4 board with 3.4” round screen and a NEO-6M GPS receiver. But as powerful as the ESP32-P4 is by microcontroller standards, it isn’t great at processing graphics and large datasets. Rendering a map from raw data in real-time would be out of the question, so Garage Tinkering found a clever workaround.

Because this mini map doesn’t need to perform any actual route navigation, Garage Tinkering was able to use QGIS software to prerender map images for the entire country. He then cut those images up into smaller tiles, which the ESP32 can load as necessary. All it needs to do is load the correct image and then move that image on the screen to match the GPS location.

Even rotating those map image tiles was too intense for the ESP32 to perform seamlessly, so the images always have a North-up orientation and the triangle representation the car rotates on the images.

Now Garage Tinkering can zip around the city and always see what is around him, including gas stations and other preset points of interest.