The nMedia project is my personal attempt at fitting a Linux based media computer into my car. This media computer is designed to meet the following goals:
- To be a drop-in replacement for a standard head unit.
- To play mp3, ogg/vorbis, flac and possibly other audio formats
- Not to get lost in the whole avi/mpeg/dvd thing.
- To provide a simple, clean interface that doesn't reek of geek.
In short, it should look and act like a regular radio, despite the fact that there's really a PC inside the enclosure.
The reasons behind this are simple: I have yet to see the first Linux based mediacar project that actually looks good and doesn't get lost in feature creep. Different people have different tastes, and most people doing carpc's apparently want to go the whole way and integrate every conceivable bell and whistle into their project, but for me "media carpc" means simply a replacement for an in-dash head unit, using modern technology. With CDs lasting around 80-something minutes tops and casettes about 90 minutes, we can clearly see these music storage formats have lost the war against ever bigger harddrives and modern audio compression formats. Nowadays it's possible to carry your entire music collection with you in a sufficiently small volume as to warrant integrating it into the dashboard just like you would do with a normal radio.
So all that's needed is a simple and userfriendly interface to the tunes. What we don't need are useless bells and whistles. Although navigation might be nice, the lack of decent navigation software for Linux means we'll have to do without. At least untill we can integrate navigation software that uses vector maps instead of bitmaps, and that actually has a clue as to what's a road and what's a forest. Don't get me wrong; I personally think gpsdrive is a nice piece of software, but if all it does is showing my position as an icon on a bitmap I sadly have no use for it.
Other useless bells and whistles that have to go are things like webbrowsing and stuff like telemetry and doorlock/window/trunk lock control. A radio doesn't need to lock/unlock the doors; there's handles in the door for that, and they're easier to reach than some touchscreen button that's hidden in the nth tab of the carpc interface. A radio also doesn't need to roll the electrical windows up or down; every car with electrical windows has conveniently placed buttons just for that. It doesn't need to interface with a tiny camera hidden in the rear bumper to assist while parking: if you haven't learned to park without parking assist yet, what the hell are you doing on the road in the first place?
In short: the main goal I'm striving for is a nonintrusive and simple interface to my music collection, and if possible one that looks a little flashy to boot. On the other hand, if you're the kind of guy who really craves the stuff I dismissed as "useless bells and whistles" in a carpc project, you might wanna check out the DashPC site, courtecy of Dashwerks inc.
Fast boot time, user friendlyness and a consistent interface. Low tolerance for feature creep, and not looking out of place in the dashboard. Those are the key elements of what I'm trying to achieve here.
In order to do this, I'm going with a small form factor Via Epia Mini-ITX mainboard, more precisely the Via Epia MII-12000. I could also go for the slower MII-6000 which runs at 600 MHz, and runs on the fanless Eden processor instead of the actively cooled Nehemiah, but I like to have some spare power, the fan is so silent it won't be audible over the engine noise anyway.
On the software side I'm probably going with a minimal debian installation, but with a custom compiled kernel carrying only the stuff I need and nothing else. Most of the work will be in building the interface. This one will be custom built, and represents the biggest stumbling block: I'm not exactly the best coder around. So this will be somewhat of a learning experience for me.
