CarPlaySource: iMore

What you need to know

  • Manufacturers have to support CarPlay for it to work.
  • Most charge an extra fee, if they support it at all.
  • This Reddit user turned a Raspberry Pi into a CarPlay receiver.

If you head onto any car manufacturer's website you'll see some very nice, very expensive cars. Most of them will have the option to enable Apple CarPlay and a few might even have it as standard. But what if you could just use a Raspberry Pi and an $8 cable instead? Wouldn't that be cool?

Why yes, yes it is.

Reddit user 41298 shared the whole thing on Twitter, complete with a video showing it in action.

Apparently, all it took was an old Raspberry Pi 3 and an $8 CarPlay cable from AlliExpress. Right now you need to use a mouse to move around, but the poster says they might try the whole thing with a touchscreen next.

So I haven't seen anybody post this but I just got the CarPlay Interface running on my raspberry pi 3. To get that done I installed linage os in the pi. That allowed me to install the app to enable CarPlay that came with my aliexpress CarPlay dongle. Overall it was very straightforward to get it to work although I was not able to test it with a touchscreen so I could only navigate the interface with my mouse.

Is there anything those little computers can't do?