I have always loved those old TV series with futuristic tech in those futuristic vehicles, like Knight Rider, Airwolf, and Street Hawk. So it got me thinking about how easy it would be to add a computer to a vehicle. Now I know it’s been done before, and a quick Google search shows multiple companies making very complex vehicle computers, but at a large cost.

Well, I thought, my Raspberry Pi is the perfect device for this.

It’s cheap

It’s very small

It’s got small power requirements (runs off a micro USB car charger)

It’s got flexible video and audio outputs (HDMI and Composite RCA for video, HDMI and 3.5mm audio jack for audio)

And best of all, you can change operating systems by simply switching out SD cards.

Below is a photo of the Raspberry Pi running the excellent media center-type operating system Raspbmc which is perfect for browsing and playing your media collection using a media center remote or something similar, as shown in the Parts list.

My project can also be found on the Raspberry Pi main blog at http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4062. Here’s how I made it.

Derek Knaggs submitted this project for our Raspberry Pi project contest.