Raspberry Drive

Driving a car used to be mainly about getting from point A to point B, and a cassette player or CD changer was all the entertainment anyone really expected. These days, large display screens that can play movies, games, and our entire music library have become commonplace. But we did not jump straight from one extreme to the other — there was an in between time not so long ago. In that time, the beginnings of the modern era of infotainment could be seen, but today these systems just seem dated and unsatisfying.

There are many such cars still on the road, however. And in the case of an otherwise perfectly good automobile, it does not make much sense to throw the baby out with the bathwater simply for better entertainment options. Engineer and hardware hacker Folkert van Heusden of the Netherlands has a car of this sort — an older Opel Astra Tourer with a now somewhat primitive infotainment system. Irritated by the limitations of that system, van Heusden decided to do some work to improve it.

The car does have an audio input jack, which could be a reasonable way to enhance the music playback system. Mounting a modern smartphone to the dash to do all the heavy lifting would be about all that is needed. Unfortunately, the audio input jack performs terribly, resulting in very bad sound playback quality. Bluetooth would be another great option, but it is not a supported option on a vehicle of this vintage.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Astra does have a USB port for attaching a portable drive. Transferring music to a thumb drive is only a minor inconvenience. But, as you might expect, there was another limitation of this older car — it could only recognize a maximum of 1,000 songs on the drive. That may sound decent enough, but after a couple weeks of driving, this limitation starts to make a person feel like they are living out the movie Groundhog Day.

To get around this limitation, van Heusden came up with an interesting solution involving a tiny Raspberry Pi Zero single board computer. The Linux kernel supports a driver called the Mass Storage Gadget, which can create virtual USB mass storage devices. This allows the Raspberry Pi to be seen by the infotainment system as nothing more than a USB stick, which it will happily read music files from.

An interesting trick, but that alone does not buy van Heusden anything more than an actual USB stick can offer. But of course the Raspberry Pi is a full-blown computer, so with some Python scripting, a system was worked out to create disk images that can be presented to the Mass Storage Gadget on demand. In that way, different sets of 1,000 music files can be presented to the infotainment system without needing to actually take a drive back home and load it with new music.

This is a pretty slick setup, but there is still some room for improvement. At present, the device just picks a random disk image to play, but van Heusden intends to update that in the future so that specific images can be selected, or at least so that it is possible to intentionally switch to a different image. There are also plans to make a case for the board and speed up the boot process to make the entire system a bit more polished, and so that no one gives van Heusden any funny looks for the wires and bare PCBs hanging out near the dashboard.

If this type of hack could revitalize the infotainment system in your car, be sure to take a look at the project write-up for more details.