I've been working on this project for a few days, and planning for quite some time now, and really excited to share it with you!
[Pic to follow]
So the set up: I've had my '08 SR5 4WD for some two years and I absolutely love the thing. Have a slew of projects lined up, and I'll be sharing those as they go in here. Lighting, custom low profile safari rack, over-the-spare aux fuel tank, a bunch of the weekend mods listed here (amazing resource!). In short, I hope you guys enjoy watching this build take shape as much as I like putting the sweat and skinned knuckles into it.
The bread and butter of this project, and the source of it's name, will be my virtual interface I've been designing. I've begun mounting my lightbars (2 4" LED pods and a 32" bar mounted on my Westin grille guard), but the problem I was encountering was where to mount the switches. Initially I started with the three bays behind the shifter; I deloomed the DAC button and put it with the diff lock, etc (seriously, why wasn't this there before?), which gave me the two switch bays I needed plus an additional for the volt meter. The only problem with this, I'd find, is my damn dog loves to paw around that area, constantly flipping switches. In order not to draw the ire of everyone on the road, I realized I had to rethink this.
Primary Suspect
So, my background is Electrical Engineering and my occupation is programming, so I had this brilliant idea: touchscreen interface for controlling the lights and other peripherals driven by the Raspberry Pi single board computer (hence the name: 4PiRunner! Haaaaah nerd humor...) For those unfamiliar, it's a great, wallet-sized PC that runs linux, with built in GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins that can be programmed to control and read signals. With a bit of relay magic, I am planning on the Pi interfacing with a relay board, which will in turn run signal lines through the firewall to fused automotive relays for each peripheral (primarily lights, at this point). Here's a demo set up:
YouTube
The program adds a customizable number switches (up to eight at this point) and automatically links the pins they control. On tap, effectively a mouse click, the program updates the image to appear as a flipped rocker switch and send a high signal out the correct GPIO pin. As a demonstrator, I've shown the triggering of LEDs, but this will, when installed, control a relay chain to the LED light bars.
The great part of this project is the additional capability of the Pi. As it is truly a computer, I'll have internet and office capability built in (the revision 3B model I'm using as integrated WiFi and Bluetooth), and the GPIO pins can be configured and programmed to read sensors I may add (temp gauges, etc) and display them as virtual gauges on an additional page. Super pumped about this!
