I had GPSD working nicely, confirmed both by cgps -s and mongps, but I was stuck on geoclue. Whatever I did, the GPS wouldn’t send data to Organic Maps. I kept having this error: “Error: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Object does not exist at path “/org/freedesktop/GeoClue2/Client/1”” despite being 100% sure client1 was the right one.

Going to Lineage OS was much easier for me and I just needed a working GPS. Linux GPS will stay in the “challenge todo list”, because I’d like to figure it out eventually. I most likely was doing something stupid.

That’s the obvious route, indeed. But it’s not a fun one, I don’t get to own the data and the device is subject to poor updates which will render it useless in a few years. I’d rather buy an old GPS than buy a new phone honestly. The phone that is currently the culprit cost me 230, 23 months ago. It still works perfectly fine outside of the car for everything I need it for, it just doesn’t like being used in car. It’s too much for it I guess, though it wasn’t too much two years ago.

I considered a tablet, but I’m not sure if there’s a serious advantage over a phone at that point.

I didn’t take it as throwing shade :) I just thought I’d provide more context, though reading it back now it looks more like a rant.

Another person here pointed me to the Crankshaft too. It looks cool but it still uses a phone. I’ll try to erase this silicon slab from the equation entirely. From my personal experience over the years, phones have become a hindrance more than a supportive gadget.

I think i’ll go ahead and give it a try. I just need to figure out a way to cool the device properly in a hot environment.

Yeah, possibly, I might be a contrarian but I’m tired of cloud services, subscriptions, big corporations. I’m also tired of multipurpose devices that do plenty of things poorly. I just want a screen that shows me how to get somewhere, reliably. My phone from two years ago simply stopped being recognized by the car, bought a new one for that single purpose, and this fella already crashes too.

I didn’t go crazy on the budget but it worked initially and now it doesn’t at all so I’m tired of this bad tech. If I build my own, my hope is that I can make it more resilient and easier to repair/fix.

Yeah, that’s one thing still on the drawing board. The reason my phone crashes seems to be thermal throttling due to heat buildup with use. That’s another reason I want to build my own device instead of buying one from some company, I can factor in the cooling and try to adapt to the hot environment better.

I have zero experience tinkering with cars so my first draft for power was simply a huge powerbank or two. In my use case, the device is meant for use when I drive alone, and when that’s the case it’s mostly very short trips of maximum 1 hour with standstill traffic, but more often than not max 30 minutes. Down the line I might improve the system and wire things more permanently but I need to build confidence first.

I was also looking at using the cigar plug for power, potentially, but I like the idea of a self sufficient, removable portable device.