[Nexus 7 General] dreamonn:
I've decided to put together a Nexus 7 car install after pricing up an OEM retrofit for my E90 & quickly getting north of £1200 with no guarantees that everything would work as I wanted.

I've used Android devices to provide navigation & audio since getting a HTC Desire many years ago, but I've been caught out a couple of times recently using navigation on long journeys with my HTC One-X completely flattening its battery despite being on charge the whole time!! The last time left me navigation-less in a strange city, in rush hour traffic, with no way to contact anyone.

I've been reading around Nexus 7 car installs today & everything that I would like to do seems to have been done before, but I'd like some ideas for the best way to pull it all togther.

The main use for the Nexus will be to provide navigation & audio. I gather that Timur's kernel - USB ROM contains features which are suited to using the Nexus in a car install - are there any other ROMs I should have a look at?

I would like the install to look as professional as possible but be removable & reversible, so I'm thinking of a mounting it in a SHG-NX2000, & I would prefer to use a single USB connection to the Nexus rather than a USB & 3.5mm so from my googling today I gather I can achieve this with an OTG USB cable & a USB DAC.

I've not used an OTG cable before, but the ones I've seen on ebay seem only to be a couple of inches long - can anyone provide a link to longer one or can I just use an extension cable & stick the OTG cable near the hub? The idea I've got in mind is to run the host OTG cable from the Nexus into a powered USB hub located in the glove box or behind the dash. I would supply the power to the hub from a DC-DC convertor to make sure everything gets the power it needs. Are hubs usually wired to supply power to the host device as well as the connected devices? Are OTG cables available which allow the power to be supplied to the host? If so, I could use one of the ports on the powered hub to supply power to the Nexus via the OTG cable.

I don't have a spare line level input to my stock BMW headunit, but I do have an aux in on a 3.5mm socket which I don't mind re-routing & hard wiring to the output of the DAC - can someone link to a USB DAC best suited to this task?

I would also like to install a reversing camera. There are cameras available which either replace a license plate light, or mount around the license plate - I would prefer to use one of these over a webcam. I had an idea of using an Easycap to connect the license plate cam to the USB hub - has anyone done this? The license plate cams pick up their power from the reversing lights - is there a way of using the fact of the camera powering up to switch the Nexus to auto display the feed from camera when the car is put in to reverse? Taking this idea a step further, has anyone configured a system where if the car is then subsequently taken out of reverse gear the Nexus switches to a forward facing camera either for a fixed amount of time or until reverse gear is re-selected to give you alternating rear/forward views when parking up?

Shopping list so far:

Nexus 7 (1st gen) £119

SHG-NZ2000 £22.39

DC-DC convertor £5.50

10-port powered hub £6.19

Micro USB OTG Host £1.99

E90 License plate light CCD camera £17.00

Easycap £3.37

USB DAC £11.49

Total so far ~£185 :D

Anything I've missed? Better components? Cheaper prices?

Any help or ideas greatly appreciated