Kesh's 3.0R

[Kesh]

Hey guys and girls,

I thought I'd make this thread to both keep track of all the progress I make as well as maybe even inspire others to do some similar mods to their Liberty/Legacy. So I bought my car a month or so ago, it's a 2005, silver 3.0R and it had 185,000 on the clock.

I gave the car a good polish and wax, and took her out for her first photo shoot!




If this car were to have a mission statement, it's basically a car I would like to use to promote me and my mate's detailing business, but also for me to use as a good all round daily driver, where a balance between form and function is key. I'd like to stick to that philosophy for every modification I do to the car. I'm a P-plater with very limited practical knowledge so this car will be teaching me a whole lot about the world of cars and modifying!

[shav]

Nice car. Any chance you can reduce the size of those shots? Just that im only getting 75% of the picture not the full shot.

[Kesh]

Nice car. Any chance you can reduce the size of those shots? Just that im only getting 75% of the picture not the full shot.

Haha sorry! Should've hit preview before I hit submit!

[shav]

Thats better. Nice shots btw. Car is looking clean. This is a good base to start with. Now you can refer back it when you make a cosmetic change.

[Kesh]

Thanks Shav! That's the aim, would love to look back on this in the future some time!

In the mean time, the first diy modification I'm thinking of doing is a tablet install.

The car originally only had a 6 stacker, and in today's world, it was quite a hassle to use. The first thing I did to remedy the issue was get a GROM Aux kit to plug into my phone for the time being. I did plan to do use it for my tablet install at some point in the future. I had read up a lot of people's own work, typically, they used a nexus 7 tablet and used another fascia with a bigger opening more suitable for a larger screen like a tablet. I was thinking about going on the same route, but the cost of the fascia really put me off, but got me thinking.



So I pulled out the existing cubby fascia that my car came with and did some measurements and decided that I'd go buy an 8" Samsung galaxy tab 4 for my car PC instead. Although the galaxy tab 4 7" would've fit quite snug between the two air vents, if there was going to be cutting involved, why not go all out and so, I went and bought the 8" today.



As you can (sort of) see, the reason I chose the 8" over the 7" Nexus or Samsung, is that this screen size actually fills up pretty much the entire opening, which I think looks really clean.

Now I need to modify the fascia to fit the tablet properly. Shouldn't be too difficult, my dad is a toolmaker so this sort of stuff would probably be childs play for him! haha

[shav]

Thats a great idea. If you are handy with the tools and electronics then I can see this working. Although I think I have read this may have been done already in the audio section of the forum. So you may want to ponder over and have a read up if there is a thread on it. Good to see you are thinking and willing to give it a crack.

[Kesh]

Thats a great idea. If you are handy with the tools and electronics then I can see this working. Although I think I have read this may have been done already in the audio section of the forum. So you may want to ponder over and have a read up if there is a thread on it. Good to see you are thinking and willing to give it a crack.

Thanks mate! I'm all for learning haha! Yeah! There's a pretty big thread on the audio forum, I've had a good peak and got some good ideas. I'll post the software specifics tonight.

[shav]

Thats a great idea. If you are handy with the tools and electronics then I can see this working. Although I think I have read this may have been done already in the audio section of the forum. So you may want to ponder over and have a read up if there is a thread on it. Good to see you are thinking and willing to give it a crack.

Thanks mate! I'm all for learning haha! Yeah! There's a pretty big thread on the audio forum, I've had a good peak and got some good ideas. I'll post the software specifics tonight.

Excellent. Will be watching with interest.

[Kesh]

So for the software side of things, I'm using a program still under development called AutoMate. It's in beta but it's absolutely fantastic and a must have for anyone considering doing anything like this.



This is what the mainscreen looks like. And if you haven't guessed, it's made to mimick the upcoming android auto!

One of the biggest concerns is power and battery. I'm using a power hub sort of thing, it converts 1 12v cigg output into 4. I plan to use these for things like a dash cam, as well as a hard drive for movies! But anyway, if the tablet is always on, it will indefinitely go flat within days if I don't drive the car, and as a consequence, it will wear the battery down quite hard, and unnecessarily so. To counter this, I am using an automation app called tasker.



This is a summary page. Power any is the name of the rule I have created, once that rule has been satisfied, it will execute the command car mode, and if it's dissatisfied, it will execute sleep. That is, once the tablet is receiving power (when I turn the key and the cigg lighter starts charging), it assumes that the car is now on.



This is the "car mode" rule that will be executed once the key is turned. What this says is, wake up the screen from where I last left and keep it on, then turn on wifi and bluetooth (this is for hotspot and OBD2 respectively).



This is the "sleep" rule that gets activated once the key is taken out. It simply puts the tablet into airplane mode, turning bluetooth and wifi off and also locks the display.


This will mean that the tablet is using almost no power at all when the car is off, I might see a max 3 percent loss per day, and that's generous.

Keep in mind I will be expanding this. For example, in the future, I will make "car mode" automatically play the last song when I turn the car on. But this will be done later once I've ironed out all the other stuff!

[shav]

Like it a lot. Looks simple to use which is a bonus

[McDoof]

I like your thinking. I have some similar ideas but was not willing to take the plunge just yet. Good to see someone else taking the guess work out of things.

[bigBADbenny]

You're good with tasker already

[Kesh]

Thanks for the encouragement everyone! I think I'm more software savvy than practical! Probably naturally because of my age! Haha

So I've test fitted the tablet in the car with some trusty rubber bands! And with some testing, I've found some issues I should address.

1. Glare. It was a beautiful day, unfortunately that gave the tablet a lot of glare.

Solution, anti glare film will reduce the glare and as a bonus, it'll reduce the amount of fingerprints which is always welcome. Also when the fascia is designed, I'll mount the tablet a bit further inside, that way there's a sort of hood to alleviate the glare, kinda like what you see with iDrive systems on beemers. Except not as deep, because you'll still need to touch it.

2. Touch reach and accuracy. Sometimes, it can feel as though the tablet is a bit too far away for pressing certain buttons, sometimes you have to really try to aim your finger, taking concentration off the road. It's really not that bad because I'm using a huge screen. But if I feel it's really neccessary, I have a solution for it too!

Solution. Now this quite interesting! What I might do is use one of my old touch screen phones, a nexus 5, and use that as a touch pad! There's an app that will allow me to do this via bluetooth. Perfect. I think the perfect place to mount it is the empty space where the seat heater switches used to be! Exciting! The concept sounds really good in my head, but I'll see if it works well in practice. Will have a more indepth post in the future about this!

3. As I described earlier, the tablet will come on once I switch the key into accessory, and off when I take the key out, as it receives no power. What I forgot about is that when you're starting the car, 12v power to the cigg lighter is temporarily stopped to give the starter motor all the power it needs. So it'll turn off then turn on again, which looks a little rough on the edges, and I don't like that

Solution. Quite simple. I think I'll set a 10 second delay on the exit task, sleep. This will give the car 10 seconds to turn on before it shuts off. If that's not long enough, something's wrong with the engine for sure hahaha!

[andy_mac]

Seem to have this stuff pretty well downpacked.
Any thoughts on how to get around the power supply limitation when using usb for power and data?
Really want a bigger tablet for my setup but customising a rom myself is a bit out of my league. So getting a nexus 7 seems to be the only way around it at this point.

[Kesh]

Seem to have this stuff pretty well downpacked.
Any thoughts on how to get around the power supply limitation when using usb for power and data?
Really want a bigger tablet for my setup but customising a rom myself is a bit out of my league. So getting a nexus 7 seems to be the only way around it at this point.

Thanks mate! I was aware that I'd have no data connection through USB, so I use a software called AirDroid. I have it installed on my tablet as well as my computer at home. So whenever the tablet is parked in the drive way, it can access the home network and I can transfer whatever I want straight to the tablet from my mac or pc in my room. Other than that, there's bluetooth, but unfortunately, there's no solution that I can implement (right now) to fix that problem. Although it isn't a problem for me, that's why I'm not too fussed