Apart from hoarding driver CDs and diskettes in 1999 I also printed out a huge number of pro-Linux news articles. One of those was this page on building an MP3 player for a car called The MP3mobile.
Over the years I had grappled with the idea of adding an MP3 player to whatever my current car was but never really got anywhere but the MP3mobile was the initial source of inspiration for this idea.
The furthest I ever got with the idea was using a portable MP3 CD player but that didn’t work too well:
- Bumps in the road caused skips.
- Irish roads are bumpy.
- More skips.
It’s funny now to see what the MP3mobile can do, but back then this was highly impressive.
The final result is immensely wonderful, and impresses the hell out of most hackerish people (like me). Non-computer people just wonder why you havn’t got a CD player. But, with my setup (based on RedHat Linux 5.0) I can do these things:
* NFS mount my car from my laptop (there’s a loose 10-base-T cable behind the drivers seat) and squirt new tunes into it.
* Hook up my GSM-modem to the car (so you can telnet into it and run emacs at 60mph 🙂 ).
* Hook up a GPS unit, so you could finger the car and find out exactly where a car full of computer equipment suitable for stealing is located.
* Compile as I go round bends.
* Coredump as I change gear 🙂
None of these things can be done with an autochanger. Sorry, but you lose 🙂
Future plans include:
* 418Mhz low-power radio link to allow me to upgrade the software when the car is in the garage 30m or so from the flat.
* Link into the car’s engine management to monitor boost pressure, etc
* Voice-command of the music functions.
The machine ran off a Pentium 166MMX CPU, and had a 2.5″ laptop drive with a massive 2.1GB of storage space.
It all seems so quaint and obsolete now doesn’t it? That may well be how your current state of the art tech appears in another twenty years!
In the time since then the rise of smart phones led to miniaturisation, better screens and power efficient computers. A few years later a Raspberry Pi or Android phone would have been a suitable replacement for the device. And later still Android Auto or Car Play would make the job of playing your own media even easier.
If you use an Android phone, then your car stereo could run Linux, at least through Android Auto as your phone has a Linux kernel!