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.
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 TFTÂ touchscreen in-car computer system
Useful stuff
The two still-useful features are the reversing camera – it flicks on when you go into reverse – and the current outside temp from a sensor somewhere.
I am going to add the cd player and minidisc to ‘useful’ – they are part of the main head unit.
I would love to integrate the DVD and HD into a new system too.
What to do?
I have had the car for a year now and decided to pull the screen etc and replace it because:
- 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 tried, sets itself back to Japanese time – I assume it comes off the GPS. Dunno.
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.