Finished my Range Rover install - a couple questions
This weekend I finished up the installation of my custom in-dash display into my '01 Range Rover. The OEM NAV screen in the Range Rover is only 5 inches, so fitting a 7inch screen in that same space was quite a project.
All in all it turned out pretty good. Here's some photos of the install.
The screen is a Dynamix 7inch VGA touch screen reduced to it's bare essentials and mounted behind a custom burl mahogony bezel. In the bezel I have mounted five push buttons which are connected to a I-PAC keyboard encoder/emulater. One challenge I face is to finding just five globally useful SD functions to bind these push button inputs. Here's what I have so far:
1: Home screen
2: Show Module Switcher (see below)
3: Left (would rather have Up)
4: OK/Enter
5: Right (would rather have Down)
The Show Module Switcher module in StreetDeck is a kick-***, eye-candy switcher that is almost perfect for my application. It displays as a carrousel of the active modules, left/right rotates the carrousel, and OK activates the module in the front. The modules are shown around the carrousel with live thumbnails.
The Show Module Switcher is great, except it has a couple of issues for me:
a. Left/right appear to be the only keys that spin the carrousel. If the rotate supported up/down I'd be much happier because these keys are more useful in other modules that have lists. Any chance up/down could also spin the carrousel in addition to left/right?
b. if you spin the carrousel to a module and wait like 10 seconds, it will switch to that module. This would be more useful if it were only about 5 seconds (maybe even less). This way I can just rotate the carrousel with the left/right (or preferably up/down) keys and quickly switch to the right module without having to hit OK.
c. the touch screen is active for the module shown in the front of the carrousel, not the Show Module Switcher module. thus if you touch somewhere on the carrousel module, it will actually control the module shown in the front of the carrousel. What's cool is that the small thumnail shown for the front module actually is live, so the results of the click are actually shown in the mini-thumbnail. But I think it would be more useful to have the clicks on the Sbow Module Switcher module control the carrousel rather than sending them to the active module. Try it, you'll see what I mean.
I also tried binding a button to Cycle Modules. This would be ok too, but it gets stuck on DVD and stops cycling right there. I don't have a DVD movie in, but I wouldn't most the time anyway, so this appears to be a bug for me. I'm not sure if it would cycle properly if a DVD movie was in or not.
I had to squeeze a little of the display area on the 7inch screen to make the bezel fit the space, and because of that I am relying on SDs awesome ability to size and and position the display area. This works great except in the camera module. where the buttons don't show up in the right spot and the click targets seem to be off a bit.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the install, and SD is the perfect (and probably the only) in-car package for me. Way to go Chuck and the rest of the SD crew. I'd love to hear if anything can be done with the issues/requests above.
Dalen
