A BMW retrofit kit for the e46 M3 is expensive! As all things BMW are... Even used ones run close to $1000, thats right, $1K! For 10 year old electronics. I was even thinking about looking for a totaled car that I could strip the navi out of it, and then sell the car off. But that seems to be a lot of work, and may not turn out very well...
So I started thinking about what would be the best way to get a navi in my car. I looked at car pc's (mp3car.com), which looks awesome and have great potential, but it seemed like a lot of work to get something that I would want.
I got a big screen phone (DroidX 4.3") thinking that I would just use that as a navi/radio/etc... in there. But I don't think that is an ideal setup. Then I thought about tablets, as in Android tablets. The potential is amazing! Thus I started my research.
The B&N Nook Color really caught my eye when people found out that it could be hacked. And then when B&N said they would release the SDK! Sold. The android development community is huge and growing fast. This idea has been in my mind for a few months now, but I was never really sold on it.
Then I was reading about Bluetooth OBDII scanners. I thought that this would be kind of sweet when connected to a tablet. Easily have access to all that data! I am an engineer, I LOVE DATA! But I was not sure how well it would work with a tablet. There are a few apps that say they work, but they are from small developers. And I don't want something that will cause me any problems.
Then today came the Pièce de Résistance:
Last year Garmin released the ecoRoute OBDII scanner for the Nuvi GPS units. And just the other day, Garmin released the Garmin Mechanic Android App that communicates with the ecoRoute.
This is a top company making the hardware and software. This is the last piece to make it perfect. But I am drifting from the original navi idea... So I was thinking about using the GPS in my phone for the navi. But then the set-up would require my phone a little too much. So I went online and quickly found Bluetooth GPS receiver modules!
So here is the idea:
1) Root DroidX so that I can activate the Wifi HotSpot feature
2) Get a Nook Color and install Android Honeycomb
3) Buy a Garmin ecoRoute
4) Buy a Bluetooth GPS module
5) Install the Garmin Mechanic app on nook
6) Install the Google My Tracks app on nook (for track days!)
7) Install Google Navigation app
With this set up I can have easy access to all the OBDII car info, stream media over the internet to my radio, have a navi with logger capability, and tons of other features because I have the Android market!
