Pimp My Buick

I was fortunate enough to inherit a classy '95 Buick Century from my late grandfather. I decided to honor him by making some 'modifications'.

The first step was to fix the audio situation. The included amplifier and speakers were sub-par to say the least. I built a simple audio amplifier based on the STMicroelectronics STA540 (datasheet) and installed some 200W drivers I got off eBay. It sounds great, but it gets quite hot, necessitating the large heatsink. It's a class A amplifier too, which are notoriously inefficient. I may replace it with a more efficient class D amplifier in the future.

Next I decided to replace the dashboard with an acrylic panel, with a touchscreen in the middle controlling the vehicle's subsystems. The brains will be a Beagleboard running a custom Android build. I've spent quite a bit of time poking around Android's internals and though I will likely have to write some custom drivers, it's just Linux and JNI, which I am plenty familiar with. Long live open source! So time to take out the dashboard...

After some digging I landed a great deal on a touchscreen. This came from VitroLight in China - screen, controller board, and touchscreen all for less than $100. The only problem documentation is a little scarce (nonexistent). I may need to spend some quality time with a logic analyzer to get this working properly.

Beagleboards are out of stock everywhere...I've been waiting on Digikey to ship me mine for months now. Will update when I receive it. In the meantime I've been running and programming a Beagleboard virtual machine using the excellent qemu ARM emulator. Instructions for doing so are here.