Head Unit
Nissan has used a plagued Clarion head unit on its Pathfinders throughout the 00s. It has no auxiliary input or Bluetooth connectivity - other than for phone calls. With Android head units becoming cheaply available, a lot of the owners have switched to them. Which would be fine except this swap leaves ~40 control buttons on the dashboard disconnected, which is not desirable for an obsessive person like me. So I've started designing my own head unit, based on a Raspberry Pi and written in Python. My plan is to make use of the original Clarion display and the control buttons and interpret them through the Pi. This also gives me extra opportunities: to add a much needed vehicle status screen populated through the CAN bus, and to control my off-road light bars through the infotainment system via a relay board that can be controlled with USB or the Pi's GPIO pins. I've kept the visual language as subdued as possible to imitate the general aesthetic of this now 17 year old vehicle.
15.10.2021