hcrap

Does anybody have the technical knowledge to hack the navi system to use a flash drive instead of the DVD? Flash memory are so cheap now. I can get a 8GB CF for $20 and IDE or PCMCIA adapter to the navi unit for about $10. All navi operation is read so we don't have to worry about lifespan of the flash drive. It would be so much faster than the DVD for boot up and searching. I have the old HDD based navi on TL that use flash drive now and it works great. Now I have a 05 odyssey that use the same navi unit as the MDX. It has a PC Card slot (PCMCIA) that would accept a 8GB FAT32 CF to load software on it. Basically, I copied the entire DVD into it and the navi unit knows how to use it for software update. However, it would not boot to that for the map database. I guess because the software mounted the DVD as the root fs. I look in MSDN and it seems that a registry setting tell the WinCE os to mount a storage provider as a root and boot file system. I think if we can extract the registry hive and edit it we can make it boot to a flash drive.

This is kinda making a custom ROM for your navi. Sort of like a custom rom for Windows Mobile phone (if you have one, check out ppcgeeks.com). Both devices are using a version of WinCE-based OS. Eventually, I hope we'd be able to hack it to a point to run any custom application (i.e. mp3, mp4 player, etc)

csmeance

Hi Hcrap, the navi dirve is a piece of work. a few members were trying to figure it out and they came up with that it runs on a windows CE platform and channels data out through an IE BUS. The flash card can have data recorded onto it, but it cannot have data read from it unless it is at the factory where the navi drive is flashed. BTW be careful with these drives, a new one can cost 3+ K

hcrap

I know it can read from it. If you follow the instruction to do the nav screen hack but instead of burning the files to the CD-R or DVD-R, copy it to a CF with PC Card adapter. It would update the software by reading it from the CF and program the nav unit. However, when it boot up, it expected to find the map data from the DVD-ROM mount and not the PC Card mount. Windows CE when it boots up usually mount flash card at \Storage Card and I guess DVD would be mounted something like \DVD. So when a program ask for the database, it look for the \DVD path which doesn't exist if you don't have the DVD inserted.