Mac mini With Front Row Hacked Into Toyota Prius

No, that’s not a go-kart sized version of the Prius, it’s a Mac mini running through the on-board display of a Toyota Prius!  Nice hack by a post from a member of the MacVroom forums. Dr. FrankenMac has almost brought this beast to life, but still has a few bugs to iron out…

So my goal was to get a mac working on my Prius’s MFD display, and be able to use it’s touch screen to control the front end (currently Front Row)

I don’t have audio hooked up, figured the video would be the hardest part.

I’m going through a Can-View which normally is just used for display the car’s CAN data http://hybridinterfaces.ca/, but has RGB+S in and outputs the MFD’s touchscreen through a serial cable.

I tried using SwitchResX to output the 640x480 at 15.75khz with no luck (got it working with powerstrip on a pc) Ended up buying a used scan converter off of ebay that outputs RGB+S.

Wrote a perl script to listen to the serial port (keyspan USB->serial converter) and sends Front Row commands through apple script. Broke the screen up into a 3x3 grid (9 boxes) Up, Down, Left, Right, center for enter/play/pause, and left top for menu/escape.

Here is what I have so far. This is just the prototype phase. I need to figure out audio, and then I’ll actually get a mac mini and try to hide all the components.

You can check out some of the images on his website.  For the full scoop, check out the post on MacVroom.com.

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