The Shower Thoughts subreddit is a collection of all those ideas or philosophical questions that race through your mind while in the bathroom. For example, “I like to think money wouldn’t change me; yet when I’m winning Monopoly I’m a terrible person,” or “12 years ago leaving CDs out in my car gave theives a reason to break in. Today, leaving CDs out is a deterrent.”

While most folks would simply browse Reddit on their phones or laptops, Harin De Mel decided to something a bit different. He managed to hack his vehicle’s dashboard to display some of the best thoughts from the last hour. Not a bad idea for when you’re stuck in traffic or sitting in the car waiting for someone to come outside, right?

The Maker sniffed the CAN bus on his 2012 Hyundai Genesis, and isolated the LCD from the rest of the network. He used Raspberry Pi and an Arduino, both of which are interfaced with an MCP2515 — one for the display, the other to receive signals from the original network. A Wi-Fi dongle on the Raspberry Pi enables Internet connectivity.

De Mel was also able to make the text scroll, which was accomplished through the CAN bus. However, Python script on the Raspberry Pi provided more control on how fast or frequently the message would come across the screen.

Now that I have a better understanding of how the LCD is controlled, I want to use the screen for more useful information. I have an in-dash Nexus 7 and would like to parse the information of the currently playing track to the car’s system as if it was an iPod. Frank Zhao was kind enough to leave a comment on my previous post pointing me in the direction of the Apple Accessories Protocol (AAP) which I will also begin to tinker with at some point in the future.

The code for the project is available on GitHub, and you can read more about the build on his blog. In the meantime, check out the video below to see it all in action.

Harin De Mel could have hacked his car to display something "useful", but where's the challenge in that? Shower thoughts, it is!

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Unlike many cars today, Aykut Celik’s 2014 Volkswagen Polo didn’t have Bluetooth connectivity or an elaborate touchscreen navigation system. So, the Maker decided to take matters into his own hands and swapped out his “useless” radio for a Samsung tablet, putting Google Maps, Spotify and other apps right in his vehicle’s dashboard.

In order to accomplish this, Celik needed an amplifier (to replace the one attached to the prior radio), a CAN bus shield from Seeed (so he could use the steering wheel’s volume buttons), a Bluetooth module, and an Arduino Mega 2560 (for parsing data and sending it over to the Android device).

A CAN-BUS shield is necessary to be able to read CAN-BUS commands from the CAN bus line… I used this shield for detecting wheel button commands like volume up, mute and volume down. Behind the car radio there are two CAN bus cables. One of them is CAN bus – HIGH and the other is CAN bus – LOW. These cables must be connected to green sockets on the shield.

Using the SeeedCAN bus shield, you can sniff you car’s CAN bus data.

The info which is gathered from CAN bus is transferred to the Android tablet via Bluetooth. There is a little app which is responsible, for example, reducing volume whenever the wheel volume button is clicked. And a menu activity to open other apps.

You can watch the elaborate project below, and read more about it on Celik’s blog. The Maker has also made the software and other information available on GitHub.

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