Raspberry Pi Car Head Unit Hardware
I've recently bought a second hand car, and it came with the original manufacturer radio and a Parrot MKi9200 which works fine, but it is old.
I then started looking around for some Android Head Units, and realized a minefield of failures and challenges. Where a large amount of units are available on AliExpress, it seems the buying experiences for <€300 is just to much much a risk for me.
So I decided the Raspberry Pi route looks a lot more fun in any case.
Here is my bill of materials. Please see this as suggestions with affiliated links for Amazon. This is what I'm using and it is working at the time of writing, no guarantees or further advise.
- Raspberry Pi 4 4Gb ,
- GeeekPi Raspberry Pi Low Profile CPU Fan allows for good cooling with the option to overclock, should the need arise,
- ELECROW touch screen monitor 5 is a simple display, works well and connects over HDMI which allows me to use this as a display for my still camera in the future as well, and
- A 8Gb or larger Class 10 Micro SD like the SanDisk Extreme 32 GB micro SD card.
You will also need a good USB-C power supply and for this I strongly recommend sticking to the official Raspberry Pi 3A power supply.
I also suggest having the Pi connected to your local network using an ethernet cable with a reserved DHCP IP. You can SSH into the Pi to do a number of management tasks.
In the next post I will tackle the 1st option for software.
