Our 2006 Subaru Legacy, when new, must have been the nuts. It is crammed with entertainment tech to make those 00s Tokyo traffic jams more manageable.
![](https://i0.wp.com/floatingintheclouds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/12-shockingly-huge-traffic-jams-from-around-the-world-2.jpg?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1)
Redundant stuff
Unfortunately, in 2018, in New Zealand, pretty much all the gizmos are next to useless. The car came equipped with:
- A 6 CD/MP3 stacker,
- mini-disc (yep! apparently Minidiscs were massive in Japan),
- A DVD drive in the glove box,
- A hard-drive for MP3s (in glove box too) and;
- a TFT touchscreen in-car computer system
![](https://i0.wp.com/floatingintheclouds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/P1030589_2.jpg?resize=320%2C212&ssl=1)
Useful stuff
The two still-useful features are the reversing camera – it flicks on when you go into reverse – and the current outside temperature from a sensor somewhere. I’ll add the cd player and minidisc to ‘useful’, and they are part of the main head unit with the radio.
What to do?
I have had the car for a year now and have decided to pull the screen and replace it:
- The whole system is in Japanese, with no English option. I was communicating with a guy who said he could upload an English translation, but he went silent when push came to shove. Maybe he was busy, maybe (s)he was a bull-shitter.
- The DVD video is locked to region 2. New Zealand is region 4.
- The sat nav has only a map of Japan only. Everything else is just ‘the ocean’. You can (apparently) load in a non Japan map.
- The in-system clock, whatever you try, sets itself back to Japanese time.
![](https://i0.wp.com/floatingintheclouds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/maxresdefault.jpg?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1)
![](https://i0.wp.com/floatingintheclouds.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/4af1bd7536a9.jpg?resize=512%2C384&ssl=1)
Replacement
I procrastinated over a few options but ended up with a Raspberry pi 3B+ and the official raspberry pi 7″ touchscreen running Emteria OS, an Android build.
It’s not ideal – slow to boot and laggy in service, and no reversing cam at the minute, but I do have my car stats courtesy of the BTSSM app. The BTSSM app does the basics – I am using a VAG-KKL 409.1 USB cable. I tried Bluetooth options- they did not work.
The video below is my replacement running (yes, the buttons are a work in progress). This series of posts is to be what I have done.