Apple TV + iPhone = Ultimate geeky car audio system
If you ever wanted to prove your geek-cred to your friends what could be better than using your iPhone as a graphical remote for your car stereo.
Nels Johnson has done exactly that, and has posted the details for how to do it yourself at his site http://www.quickanddirty.tv/.
We’d point out that you should probably have someone else controlling the tunes, whilst you pay attention to the road!
Saturday 30 Aug 2008 | | Del.icio.us | News, Hardware Hacks, How To
September 1st, 2008 at 5:44 am
This is sweet….
My question:
* Wouldn’t it be possible to have the AppleTV sync when in range of the home wifi network so all your latest music was automatically brought over to the device (and thus your car)?
The hard part to me is figuring out how to safely power up the Apple TV in the car for a while (call it an hour) and then safely shut it down on a regular basis. For example I’d want the system to turn on, run a sync and then shut itself off at a specific time (say 3am) every night.
The brute force method would be to stick the Apple TV plugin into a timer device; but I imagine hard-crashes by severing power on a nightly basis wouldn’t be all that good for the device.
September 7th, 2008 at 1:35 am
Sorry for the delay - didn’t know how soon appletvhacks would publish this.
30 gigs of my favorite music has been enough so far so I’ve put off this issue but still need to address it. Plus I live in an apartment building with underground parking so my home wifi signal is not reliable down there.
Working solution is to make the AppleTV unit as modular as possible. Unplug it from the inverter and the Airport Express, put it next to the Mac (running iTunes), re-synch, re-plug in the trunk, all on a weekly basis. Doable, but labor intensive.
If only the USB port on the ATV would support an external drive (or a 128-gig memory stick with an iTunes library)…
September 12th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
rjhd3 : Totally doable. Several small devices exist that can be turned on/off remotely or on a timer. I would suggest the timer. Or you could simply set a script on power up/shutdown of the car to sync if possible, sorta like a turbo timer for some street machines. You don’t need anything that elaborate.
A current solution I enjoy is running the ATV on a secondary smaller/lighter battery (also augmented by solar) so as not to drain your main car battery.
If you have a hybrid (electric) car, this starts to get really interesting.
You could also use your ‘jailbroken’ iPhone to control all this…
October 4th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I don’t want to be a hater or anything, but you can accomplish the same thing by… wait for it… buying an iPod Touch and plugging it directly into your system. Plus you get the bonus of being able to take it with you. It’s even quicker and not “dirty” at all.
October 19th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
i must agree Larry. while its a cool idea. its cheaper and less hassle to just hookup an ipod to your car. in addition you lose the video functionality of the apple tv and the usb printer capabilty of the airport base. plus how about when you want to add new music? are you going to rip it all out of you car to add those 3 songs you bought the day before to your apple tv.
apple tv 30 gig=$229
apple base= $99
time messing with it to make it work= ???
or
Buy new 120 gig ipod classic $250 that…. BEHOLD!, its completely portable
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:23 pm
But what if you want to control some video in your car? Might be a good idea if you have a video screen (in the back of your minivan of course…).