Help Installing Commando in Car

[Ruyen]

Well I am thinking about installing my old Commando in my wife's car as a media player and a GPS. The plan is to make a charging cradle attached to the rear view mirror. Still playing around with the settings. What I want is it to come on when the car is started then turn off when the car is.

Is there a setting or a app that would allow me to keep the screen on while power is applied to the charging cradle?? Then when the power is removed it shuts the screen off??

 

[Rukbat]

I see 2 problems.

1) Android GPS apps don't give you any travel information if there's no data (3G/4G or wifi) available. It'll be a map, but that's all.

2) Turning on the car can't turn on the phone, it can only turn on the screen if the phone is already on. Nothing but hardware (like the power switch) can turn the phone on if it's off.

 

[Ruyen]

Well think this might be a moot point. Just bricked the phone. I was switching ROM's and I am not sure what happened but POOF it is bricked. Ah well, it was a phone I haven't used in a good while.

 

[makersmark]

Sorry about your brick, it happens. But for future reference there are some good, what they call, "offline" gps apps available to a dataless user on android. Osmand is my favorite, although their search by address is awefully lame. It ask for building number... Sadly the easiest way to navigate somewhere is already have it stored, or zoom into it and plop a pin down. It is vector based, which is good for scaling, and giving the look of a real road map. But I did have an instance once where obviously two of the equations that formed the roads didn't exactly touch, and It wanted me to go all of the way around on some secondary roads to continue of the road I was already on.

Sygic is a really popular offline gps application too. I didn't use it too much because I had finally got my tethering working with my phone and wifi tablet. But It would search addresses and the GUI was geared more towards the 'cartoony' look of your standard garmin.

Both of these, of course, make you download the maps to use ahead of time. For NC, SC, Georgia, and Virginia it takes up ~750 MB of storage space for those four Osmand maps.

 

[runsondiesel]

I like Osmand as well. Put a 32 gb sd card in the phone. I had downloaded maps of about 10 states, most of Europe and a good chunk of Central America and it was only about 8 gb. With the maps stored locally the GPS doesn't need cellular data for display or navigation. The maps for the US and Europe are pretty good, the ones for Belize, Honduras and Mexico aren't very detailed. Those are the places I've used Osmand. Sometimes just having the map is enough without the turn by turn navigation Nanny.

For hand held use bring a spare battery. The GPS radio is a hungry beast.

David