Using a Garmin Nuvi as a display?

I was thinking... There's lots of old GPS systems available now for cheap.. even new ones are cheap.. to the point they're cheaper than buying the components to make a display.

I picked up a Nuvi 265W, it has bluetooth, and is powered with a Garmin branded STmicro chip, and a 2gb samsung memory chip as well

What I was really wondering is if there's any way to interface this with an arduino... Using the display to show graphs and/or text relating to the state of variables, inputs, and outputs on the Arduino... perhaps access the GPS data (not my primary goal), and perhaps even using bluetooth as a COM port to transfer data to a smartphone? There's tons of possibilities, I'm wondering if it's ever been done?

My current Arduino platforms are the Mega 2560, Uno, and Leonardo

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0 dougw over 9 years ago

Here is a long shot (low probability of working) you could look into:
- See if the GPS can play a slideshow from an SD card (I think my Garmin can),
- use an Eyefi or SD/USB card to load new pictures into the SD card while it is plugged into the GPS
- If you can delete old pictures and only have one image in the directory, maybe the GPS will display the latest update.
I suspect this cannot be done on the fly, but maybe you can get updates without too many refresh steps.
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0 dougw over 9 years ago

Here is a long shot (low probability of working) you could look into:
- See if the GPS can play a slideshow from an SD card (I think my Garmin can),
- use an Eyefi or SD/USB card to load new pictures into the SD card while it is plugged into the GPS
- If you can delete old pictures and only have one image in the directory, maybe the GPS will display the latest update.
I suspect this cannot be done on the fly, but maybe you can get updates without too many refresh steps.
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