Plastic Surgery

When you take a saw to your dash it is always a little unnerving - there is no turning back. But in order to install a double DIN chassis stereo into the truck it had to be done.  It all seemed to work out. The new stereo provides better connectivity to our iPhones, including Bluetooth, and gives an updated look to our 10 year old truck.

A climate control system problem received a temporary fix so that things are functional enough for the trip. Read on, especially if  re-circulation, blending and vent flow controls are your thing.

Setting Up the Raspberry Pi 3 Media Server

Raspberry Pi 3 and Enclosure Ready for Setup

It was not the highest priority task but it was hard to resist working on this fun project once the RPi 3 and Flirc case arrived from Amazon.

Battery Powered Media Center

When we are ‘off the cord’ we will still want be able to watch a movie, documentary or video training course.  We may install a pure sine wave inverter at some point which would convert 12VDC from the trailer batteries (two 6V golf cart batteries connected in series) to 115VAC so that a conventional AC powered system could be used, but we have taken the challenge to create a low power – low voltage media center that can be used without having to be hooked up or require an inverter.  The diagram shows the planned setup.