Next I had to hook up my new media center to the car's sound system. My first step was to remove the car's built-in radio, which was easy enough: With the help of Rosales, I popped off the plastic dashboard panel, unscrewed the radio, and yanked it out. Renato Rosales of the school's electronics class, let me mess around with a 2009 Pontiac G6 they'd been taking apart and putting back together for years. Always happy to assist a mechanical neophyte, the school, and in particular, a Mr. Without some practice I was hesitant to disassemble my personal chariot, so I reached out to Brooklyn Automotive High School to see if they'd let me potentially ruin one of their practice cars. I suppose I should have assumed that installing the touchscreen in a real car wouldn't be as easy as programming the Pi. In the meantime I now had a slick media center that could play my entire MP3 library, which I had stored on a 32-gigabyte flash drive that was plugged into the Pi's second USB slot.Īt last: the hard part. The calibration of the touchscreen wasn't as precise as I would've liked, but some tinkering would probably fix that. After I complied with some onscreen prompts to orient the touchscreen, I was good to go. , which downloaded the touchscreen driver, followed by sudo sh install.sh, which installed it to the Pi. I'll spell them out here in case you're following along, but I strongly recommend supplementing these steps with your own Internet research. I entered "xbian" and "raspberry," respectively, then typed in a few -gibberish-looking prompts recommended by Master Zaqq from that online guide. The command terminal asked for a username and password. Here is where things turn into a computer-hacking scene from a mid-nineties movie. This closed the software and opened up the command terminal for the Pi. To do this I plugged the Pi into my modem with an Ethernet cable, and, using the arrow buttons of a computer keyboard to control XBian (I connected the keyboard via USB), I highlighted the power icon in the menu screen and selected Exit. Then I had to get the XBian operating system synced with the touchscreen, and that required installing some drivers directly to the Raspberry Pi from the Internet. Here is where things turn into a computer-hacking scene from a mid-nineties movieīoth the Raspberry Pi and touchscreen turned on automatically. The touchscreen didn't come with one, so I plugged it into the wall with a twelve-volt AC/DC adapter I bought separately. I plugged the Pi into an outlet with its included power adapter. Next I linked the touchscreen to my Raspberry Pi through HDMI and USB cables. Tontec does not include instructions, but each wire snaps exclusively into a specific corresponding jack, so I managed to connect everything using trial and error. To work properly, the touchscreen needs to be connected to its three control boards via three cables. For security I used five layers of tape, and I folded any excess neatly onto the back of the LCD screen. I simply aligned the touchscreen atop the LCD screen, then ran tape along the centimeter-thick edges of the two stacked screens. There's a rough guide online to making a touchscreen dashboard in which the author, a mysterious wise man identified only as Zaqq, explains how to do this with masking tape. The LCD screen and the glass touchscreen, meanwhile, don't come attached to each other because I guess that would make too much sense, so I had to connect them myself. The touchscreen comes with a primary control board that looks strikingly similar to the Raspberry Pi, plus two smaller control boards, all of which help communicate data to the Pi. Then I ejected the card, slid it into my Raspberry Pi, and congratulated myself on becoming a genuine programmer.Īssembling the actual touchscreen-a Tontec seven-inch HD screen I found on Amazon for $75-was a bit trickier. I popped an 8-gigabyte SD card into my laptop, and by following the step-by-step directions of the free installer I downloaded from the XBian website, I copied the image directly onto my card. Most conveniently, XBian can be played on any screen with an HDMI input, including the touchscreen I planned to build. It can play music and movies, display pictures, and run other media apps such as Pandora-it can even stream content from Apple devices using AirPlay. When I searched for images that would run a homemade media center, a site called had the most popular version: software for a media hub akin to what you see on an Apple TV. There's a bustling online community of Raspberry Pi coders who make pre-programmed images available for download.
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