The fact that this maker is blasting Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 in their car isn’t the only reason we decided to feature their build, but it speaks to a very nice personality trait of theirs which we liked a lot.

We also like that, with this project, you don’t need to own a swanky newer vehicle to get the in-car entertainment screen experience. You can hang on to your ancient Honda Accord and build a DIY system using Raspberry Pi instead.

Crankshaft for Raspberry Pi

Project author MINKIN2 followed this superbly simple step-by-step guide to get set up with Crankshaft on Raspberry Pi. The guide explains that the Android Auto app on your phone runs a projection of the software on that phone, and the OpenAuto emulator software running on the Raspberry Pi receives that projection and throws it up on the big touchscreen.

Hardware

As the guide explains, you’ll need the following hardware to recreate this build for your own car:

• Raspberry Pi (the maker advises that Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+ is “the sensible choice”)
• Raspberry Pi 7″ Touch Display
• Smartphone (running Android 5.0 or higher) with the Android Auto app installed
• Mount for the touchscreen (the maker recommended this one as it holds the touchscreen and Raspberry Pi together)

You’ll also need the right cables to connect the smartphone and power supply to your Raspberry Pi. Unless you’re using Bluetooth for your audio connection, you’ll need some kind of audio cable to connect the Raspberry Pi to your car’s AUX socket.

And you’ll need to throw a microphone of some description into the mix if you’d like to be able to use Google’s voice assistant, which I’d strongly recommend to reduce the amount of button fiddling you need to switch songs or radio stations while you’re driving.