Latent Powers

A few weeks ago I felt like it would be fun to see if I can make one of those cheap Chinese CarPlay dongles run something other than the stock firmware. The idea was that rather than just forwarding CarPlay, why not do something more interesting with them? They all work quite similarly: they act as bridges between your car and the phone. From there they deal with video and audio streams and pass some other data through. Most of them also bring up a custom UI for pairing and have a web interface that your phone can reach for updates. Long story short: I had a conversation with Fable and Sol via Pi about what could be done with such a dongle or whether I should use a Raspberry Pi instead if I wanted to do my own thing there. I figured it might be quite fun to run my own code while still allowing regular CarPlay to pass through. Through working with the LLM I learned about CatPlay, which is a Rust reimplementation of the CarPlay protocol that can run on Carlinkit devices. In particular,…