I am slowly grinding away at learning FreeCAD, hoping to get good enough so I can use it for future projects. There's not much to write about learning the ropes, so I'll write about a different project currently underway in parallel. I had recently concluded a cosmetic art car project, removing Plast-Dip I applied to make it resemble Star Wars' BB-8. Now my car is back to its factory blue color, and I want to tackle an item that's been on my to-do list for a long time: upgrade the in-car navigation system.

Mazda offered the 2004 RX-8 with an optional in-car navigation system. It was an expensive add-on, but I was young and flush with a tech salary, so I got mine so equipped. This luxury far predated the age of everyone having maps on their cell phones. (Reminder: the first iPhone launched in 2007.) Add-on units from Garmin and TomTom existed at the time, but the factory options were superior for several reasons:

  1. Spoken directions are piped through the audio system instead of a tiny speaker on the dash.

  2. A dedicated GPS antenna with a better view of the sky than a box in the cabin.

  3. It has access to vehicle speed and direction to estimate position if GPS signal is lost.

  4. Does not occupy a power socket and does not require a tangle of wires.

  5. Screen is elegantly integrated with the interior, not a suction cup on top.

I knew map obsolescence will become a problem at some point, but I wasn't too worried. At the time I had expected to trade the car in for another one in a few years, I didn't expect to love the car enough to still have it today. A 2004 model year car that I bought in 2003 means the map data was probably compiled in 2002 if not earlier. This is now quite old, and I don't recall ever hearing anything from Mazda about map updates, for free or for fee.

One advantage of having the optional factory navigation system is that, if I wanted to tackle an upgrade project, a lot of wiring is already in place as well as the factory interior trim pieces to accommodate a navigation screen. But what would this upgrade project entail? The project ideas evolved as the years went on. Early in my car ownership, I contemplated converting the in-car navigation system to an in-car Windows PC running Microsoft Streets & Trips and patched to the in-car GPS antenna. That would have been a hugely complex project, so I never got started. For a simpler alternative, I considered shucking a Garmin free of its factory enclosure and integrate it into the car, but that never happened either. Then online maps like Google Maps got good enough I thought about replacing the factory navigation screen with an Android tablet with Google Maps running offline maps downloaded at home via WiFi. While I procrastinated, data plans got cheap enough for our phones to use live data online. So, I thought about putting a phone mount inside the factory navigation hood.

None of those happened, but I'm finally tackling the project now. The current state of the art for in-car integration takes the form of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. That'll be my target but I'm taking an unconventional route.