One of our forum members just posted an interesting hack to attach a Mac to their Prius in-dash touch screen…
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.
