Well I finally did it! I bought my double din dash piece about a year ago planning on putting a tablet in the dash but then found myself worrying more about which tablet to get and what will fit the best. Then one day I got tired of looking at this double din dash piece on my desk and went out and bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7 inch wifi tablet for 250 at walmart and just made it work lol...I did a tad bit of research on it and saw a lot of other people on mp3car.com were using the same one so I figured it shouldn't be too hard.



Link to album for bigger pictures

Parts list:
JDM double din dash piece with A/C controls
Samung Galaxy Tab 2 7inch (added 32gb SD card)
USB car charger
Female cigarette lighter connector
PAC ROEM-NIS2
1/8" x 3/4" Aluminum
Appliance rubber/foam feet (grippers)
Various nuts a bolts around the garage

Double din dash piece after I dremmeld the hell out of it to make the tablet come as flush as possible to the edge.



Little hole I drilled planning on using a little button which would slide over the power button but that didn't work out so well...so I just keep a little pin in my car for now to hit the button but honestly I don't even need to hit the power button since I have the tablet setup to turn on and off with the car. I'll keep looking for a suitable button for this to fill the hole.


Had to trim A LOT of the trim piece around the dash mainly for the headphone and charger connectors....this is the downside in trying to make the tablet as flush as possible.



Some brackets I made with some 1/8" x 3/4" aluminum and bent/drilled holes as needed...could use some smaller bolts but this is just what I had lying around the house at the time.


Bought these "grippers" at lowes which are made out of some type of foam material but they didn't grip as well as I thought so I put a couple strips of double sided tape on the back of the tablet to make sure nothing would move around....Please excuse my poor craftsmanship





View of the sides and the connector locations



Tablet mounted!!



View of how I had to hack up the charging cable and headphone cable in order for the trim piece to just barely fit lol I ran the usb cable to the glove box where I also added the female cigarette lighter connector this way I can plus the tablet into my computer if I ever need to without taking my whole dash apart.



DONE!

 

Audio

Currently I am using PAC ROEM-NIS2 with the headphone cable spliced in from the tablet to rear and front. This feeds a balanced signal to the factory Bose amp and slightly bumps the voltage but...it just isn't enough when all I have is the audio controls within the tablet itself. I would say the loudness when maxed out equals about a 14 on the stock system and at which point the audio begins to clip.

The plan!
I just recently purchased a Clarion EQS746 which bumps the pre-amp voltage to 7v, allows aux input, sub woofer out with separate pre-amp adjustment and of course EQ control. I just have no idea where I will mount it lol

There is a big problem for me at least with android where that it cannot act as a bluetooth headset...in other words I cannot stream audio from my phone to the tablet and out the stereo. So this is where the aux input on the EQ comes into play. I also purchased bluetooth headset which has a 3.5mm out for use with headphones. I will use that for the aux input and plan on mounting it up top where the factory bluetooth mic is.

There is an app for android called Tablet Talk which allows you to connect your phone to your tablet and perform operations like SMS and initiate phone calls with out ever having to even look at your phone. But like I said earlier you cannot talk through the tablet if that makes any sense so you would then have to pull your phone out and put it up to your ear. So I will have my phone paired to the bluethooth headset and when a call comes in I can just press the aux button on the EQ and it will switch the sound from the tablet over to the headset where the call is coming in This could also allow anyone who rides in my car to connect to the bluetooth headset and play audio off their own device if they like.

O yeah and not really related but I'm also finally hooking up my sub! A alpine type R 500 watt mounted in a 4080 driver side enclosure. Just bought the amp and wires and will hook it up when I get the EQ installed.


User Interface / Apps

Tablet is far from where I would like it at a UI standpoint since I spent all my time focusing on just mounting the thing but I will work on that and update when I get a chance.

I read that a lot of people always jump to the conclusion that android is not a good interface for the car as far as lauching certain apps and icons being too small...android is almost completly customizable, its not a freakin iphone :P so I found this app called "Desktop Visualizer" Play store link that lets you make custom shortcuts on your homescreen to launch any application with a custom icon and can actually make the size of the icon much much bigger! check it out


Update 7/5/2012

Welp after trying out the EQ with the stock Blose amp I came to realize the bose amp is just a POS when trying to work with anything other than the stock head unit. So I completely trashed the Bose system and just upgraded the door speakers with some Polk MM6501 component speakers and a 2 channel Cerwin-Vega stealth amp. Was a little worried about not having any speakers in the rear but actually it sounds pretty awesome lol. I ran the extra RCA cables to the rear anyways in case I plan on upgrading at some point but for now I'm more than happy with the sound quality of this setup.

So as of now everything is functional and yes even the bluetooth, all I need to do now is figure out how to mount the EQ and bluetooth dongle and will close the book on this project for now. Still working on the tablet interface but I'll probably make a video at some point to showcase everything

Update 7/20/2012
I ended up switching to a Hifonics HFEQ for a couple of reasons...way better ***** on it with a bigger volume ****, higher pre-amp voltage, more flexibility with the LPF and HPF, and I can opt for red LED lights instead of that bright ass blue...after install it actually sounded a lot better than the Clarion so I'm glad I switched. Here are a few pics of all the hacking I had to do in order for it to fit in the cubby above the tablet:





As of now I cannot completely close the top of the cubby since the ***** stick out. I plan to cut out a hole in the cubby lid so when it's shut the ***** will still be accessible but flush with the lid and rest of dash.








The current home screen setup complete with **** carpet icons Currently running Cyanogenmod 9 which runs great! way faster than the stock rom...plus I installed an orange theme to match my interior lights.

 

have you tried running a set of RCA/3.5mm cables from the tablets headphone jack straight to an amp?

This is what I do when I test out a new amp that is used. At 3/4 level the speakers are loud in the cabin.

You could use Power amp as an EQ

 

haven't tried that but keep in mind I'm using the stock Bose amp, I could still go right into the inputs by splicing the cables up front but I think the separate line driver + crossfader + EQ is the way to go especially since I'll be using a sub with a separate amp. And yeah to get the volume I have now I'm using poweramp and the EQ all kinds of tweaked out.

 

Interesting setup. Finished product looks really good. Was thinking of doing something similar since I have a 7 inch Galaxy Tab laying around, also. Hopefully, you can get something working well for bluetooth.

 

Thanks! yeah I will be sure to update the OP when I get the rest of the parts in and installed, probably in a week or so.

 

That is just sexy! Grat choice w/ the Galaxy!

 

looks like it turning out real nice.. keep it up.. i'm in for the long run to see how it all turns out

 

What set your mind on a tablet vs standard 7" LCD + carPC? Seems like you are currently missing a handful of critical features like radio, BT, audio input/output/control, ect. Aside from that it LOOKS awesome and it is quite an amazing clock and weather report :P. Good luck in making it more useful.

 

Haha randy haters gonna hate. Bluetooth and audio inputs will be solved with the eq. And radio... Not exactly a critical function for me. If I really wanted radio I would've bought a tablet with a built in radio receiver which they do make in case anyone else is wondering.

 

lol how awesome is this...good job

 

great job! can you post up some more detail picture of how to connect the wires.

 

Nice build brah, but like Randy said.. i would go the carPC route.. well at least add something to where u could use a disk player or some kind of input/output device... still looks dope and clean thou.

 

Lol you guys must've never really used an android tablet before. I have no need for cds ever man its 2012 where u been? :P

 

Nice man. I took my stock nav out.

As you know from all the trim work you did, you understand the Samsung Galaxy was a tad too large. I could not replace the factory Van unit do to size.

I am now looking to flush mout the SamGalax infront of my factory Nav Until. I will build a housing around my stock Nav,

bad news is, if I do it this way it wont go up and down when I am done.



As far as your build, this is awesome!

good job!