Rockbox on the Parrot Asteroid Car Head Unit

[scooter1556]

Hello all,

I don't know if any of you have heard about the Parrot Asteroid but I have one in my car. It runs a modified version of Android 1.5 and the specs are below:

468MHz Processor
256mb RAM
3.2" 400x240 (pixels) screen: depth of 15 bits

The built in media player on the device is pretty awful really, it works well enough but I really miss the Rockbox features on my old MP3 player. My main question is, how hard do you think it would be to port the Android build of Rockbox over to this device. It has the ability to install apk files as normal so that isn't a problem and it has USB ports for hard drives, flash drives etc.. as well as an sdcard which is mounted like any other Android device. The only thing it doesn't have is a touchscreen so the Rockbox app would need to be written with support for up, down, left, right keys which it may already have. The device does have a menu button so popup menus aren't an issue. What do you think?

[saratoga]

If you load a 3rd party APK, do the buttons on your stereo correspond to any action?  If so, you probably just need to change a keymap.

[[Saint]]

There is of course the /slight/ issue of RaaA not running on these ancient Android versions for quite some time...
Unless I'm mistaken the minimum version was 1.6, and is now 2.1 so without an OS update (or if RaaA did ever run on 1.5 building yourself a truly ancient version of RaaA) its probably not going to happen...


[Saint]

[scooter1556]

Thank you for the comments. I tried building yesterday from sources and as Saint mentioned, I immediately came across the issue of the current code using functions not present in Android 1.5's API. So, looks like I will have to modify some of the code to function with the old API and possibly lose some of the functionality of the the application. With regards to the buttons on the Asteroid, it has a home and back button like a normal android phone, and then a jog wheel which works the same as a left, right arrow key on a usb keyboard, keypad or jog wheel on a phone with a button in the middle of it which is the same as an enter key or pushing down on the jog wheel of the phone so I don't think it will be an issue mapping the buttons if it hasn't already been done. Does anyone know if the Rockbox app has ever run on Android 1.5 or how much work will be involved? I do intend to look into it myself, but be good to know what i'm letting myself in for!