augieman

Here is a picture of an XC90 (with Nav) dash.



I don't have the Nav but I do have that center speaker grill with a lot of space below it.

I'm thinking of putting in a 7" touchscreen there but I don't want that to be the central point of the whole system. I'd like to have the screen come vertically up, but I was even thinking about having two positions. Most often, I'd only have it come up say an inch or two and it would give me display data, like station, song, etc. It would come all the way up for Nav.

What I really want to try and do first is find a 4.25 by 3.75 inch color LCD that I can install in place of the center piece in the factory radio. I really want to keep a factory look. There are dash kits and I could mount a 7" touchscreen in the dash, but then everything is touch which I don't like and it doesn't look factory anymore. That radio face isn't really the radio (wierd Volvo MOST system). It's a face plate, two button clusters, that central display, and a cd changer. I have a cubby hole in place of that MiniDisc slot. So if I could find a 4.25by3.75 screen that I could control through VGA directly, or worst case serial or USB, I could potentially build myself a 100% factory looking stereo. It doesn't even need to be touchscreen. I could just hide the existing screen, remove the cubby hole and the new screen would fit perfectly. Then hopefully I could hack an I-PAC into the button clusters. Finally I'd just need to code my own interface.

I can't find a screen that small that takes VGA. So I'm looking at serial graphic displays. I found one screen that looks like it would fit but it was just a raw screen.

Any ideas on
1) a 4.25 by 3.25 serial graphic kit? Ready for me to plug in and program (from C# preferably).
2) A motorized vertical mechanism? Best case, two stops. Worst case, just all the way up or down.


Also, I've read about the XM Direct hacks. Are there any open source projects for talking to XM and AM/FM tuners?

thanks!