Old car GPS navigator - what to use it for?

[DeepLink]

I have several old GPS navigators laying around, Garmin and Tomtom's

These are not used anymore, as I use the smart phone now
So want to do with these?

They have:
GPS receiver
Colour LCD
Touch screen
SD card
USB interface
Some kind of CPU
Battery

This is basically the building block of my other projects

So how do I make use of these?
What are you doing with your old and obsolete GPS navigators?
Show us you hacks 

[Bicurico]

Some use WinCE and can be hacked so that you get access to the normal WinCE environment. One hack for Garmin consisted in installing the TomTom executable and it's maps, which were better at the time.

Still I would consider your devices plain obsolete, as a 100 Euro Smartphone is better in all aspects.

[DeepLink]

Yes, for navigation my phone is what I use

But I was thinking of re-using the old Tomtom touch display and maybe the GPS module for other tasks

I cant be the first guy with a bunch of old surplus electronics that could be turned into something else

[darkspr1te]

I have a stack of Japanese Dvd navigation units that are almost usless, they do have usable parts but most parts are japanese with no datasheet. so that usually means cpu,gps,viccs controller etc are unknown units and dont have common pinouts. older ones are good source for common led colours and switches and once in a while eeproms/flash chips.

Euro and US navigation are a lot easier, as mentioned already theres WINCE units and most common is the MIPS WINCE setup that is based on Micros0fts design board so you will find info on them in XDA forums including sdk's and schematics.
super new units may even be android or arm based (like kenwoods are arm and can run droid if you wish) so a kernel hacking kit is you next best bet.


some fun links
https://keithlard.livejournal.com/180643.html
https://github.com/lgrangeia/tomtom-hacking

hope that helps

darkspr1te

[David Hess]

I much prefer using my independent Garmin navigator because my phone has better things to do, and the Garmin is more user friendly than Google Maps or Waze.