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 640×480 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 3×3 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 see additional pictures and a video of the system in action here.

Instructions…

1. Download the cscreen application here
2. Mount the cscreen disk image by double-clicking on the “cscreen.dmg” file that you just downloaded
3. Open the Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities) and enter the following command:
   sudo cp /Volumes/cscreen/cscreen /usr/local/bin/
   then hit return
   (you will be prompted for the administrators password)
   If you get the message “directory /usr/local/bin does not exist” enter the following commands:
   sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin/
   then…
   sudo cp /Volumes/cscreen/cscreen /usr/local/bin/
4. Download the “chres800x480.sit” StuffIt file here
5. Expand the Stuffit file and copy the “chres800x480″ AppleScript file into your Applications folder
6. Open the System Preferences and choose “Accounts”
7. Select the “Startup Items” tab and then hit the “+” button
8. Locate and highlight the chres800x480 AppleScript located in the Applications folder, then hit the “Add” button.
9. Quit out of System Preferences

Everything should be installed now. The next time you reboot your computer the chres800x480 AppleScript will run, and your monitor will be automatically set to 800 x 480!

If you are comfortable using the Script Editor, you can easily create other resolutions. Here’s the single line of AppleScript code….
do shell script “/usr/local/bin/cscreen -x 800 -y 480″