Nothing stopped the audio capture once the drive was over: CarAudio.release() only ran when
the activity went away, and through a wireless dongle it stays open, so the phone kept sharing
its screen and stayed muted (issue #43). A wireless session that drops also never closed the
music channel, since nothing calls stop() until the next session. run() now closes it, and
when the music channel closes the capture stops unless a car comes back within 3 seconds.
The 2020 Civic (issue #43) acks one audio chunk every 45 to 85 ms whatever it holds, so the
21 ms chunks Gearslip sends reached it at a quarter to half of real time: a second of music,
then silence. While the window is full, AudioLink now measures the car's gap between acks, and
when it's well over what a chunk holds, gathers the capture into chunks that last the gap,
rounded up to a power of two in frames. The Civic gets 4096 frames. A car that keeps up never
fills the window and gets the capture as it comes.
The 2020 Civic (issue #43) answers every request for its screen with its own, and waits to
hear which phone is connected over the car's Bluetooth channel. Gearslip never told it:
CarBluetooth was only set up once the car screen drew, so on a car that never shows it the
typed address never left the phone. It's now set up when Gearslip starts.
Once the car hears the address it sends Play while still on its own screen, and reaching for
the media app before the car UI exists ended the session; such keys are now logged and ignored.
The second request for the screen now runs whether or not the media channel is open, and a car
that keeps its screen gets the Bluetooth channel opened, and pairing started, as a real phone
does. When the car answers there, it is asked for its screen again.
A Skoda, a VW, an Audi and a Bolt all dropped the phone's Bluetooth audio once Android Auto was
up. If Bluetooth audio to the car was connected when it showed Gearslip and drops after, that
car's music goes through Gearslip from then on, remembered per car, and the car screen says so.
Picking Bluetooth by hand clears what was learned. When capture stays silent while Spotify
plays, the car screen says Spotify doesn't let its sound be passed on.
Gearslip took an Audi's virtual cockpit and showed black there with nothing to navigate,
instead of the car's own map (#56). It now asks for the cluster when a route starts and hands
it back once there has been none for 10 seconds.
A Bolt opened the TCP connection but never sent its first message, then sent a new
StartRequest over Bluetooth. Gearslip kept waiting on the dead connection for 88 seconds. Now a
repeat StartRequest while the session still waits for the car opens a fresh connection. A
session already under way is left alone.
The Bolt in #18 stayed connected only once Gearslip passed it the phone's Bluetooth address,
which was hidden in Settings. After a paired car connects without it, Home asks once per car
and opens About phone. Coming back, Gearslip offers the address it finds on the clipboard. The
car screen says once to finish a step on the phone when parked.
The screenshot of Vela navigating comes first, then one warning and a short table. Install
steps, the GrapheneOS note and the download check sit together, and the longer notes move
lower.
As in Android Auto, turning zooms the map, nudging pans it, and pressing brings up its buttons
for the knob to move between; Back puts them away. A card over the map with buttons of its own
keeps the knob. On the Apps screen the first knob move lands on the app opened last. Issue #74:
a Mazda 3 driver had to turn through every button to get anywhere.
The 2021 Bolt still hangs up about 20 seconds in with pings answered and GM's channel open.
These are the two channels it offers that Gearslip had never opened. What arrives on them is
logged. Without an address typed in Settings, no PairingRequest is sent.
Deezer sometimes carried on out of the phone's speaker after the car was turned off. Apps that
are buffering are paused too, and two seconds later any that started by themselves are paused
again.
The 2017 Pilot (protocol 1.0) never answered the request for its screen, even once the media
channel was open. The deprecated display field is what the 2018 Uconnect needed to give its
screen back, so the retry sends it too. The retry now also runs on cars with no media channel.
Metrolist swaps ic_heart_outline for ic_heart and keeps the name, so only the heart filled
in. A plain icon that has an outline twin in the app now counts as on.
A VW MIB2 drops an already paired phone's Bluetooth when Gearslip
connects over USB, because nothing tells it the two are the same phone
(#28). Android Auto says so on the car's Bluetooth channel with the
phone's address, which Android hides from apps. Settings now takes the
address typed in by hand; with it, Gearslip opens that channel on every
connection to a paired car and sends the address. Without it, nothing
changes.
A 2025 Nissan's Bosch unit drops the link a second after every turn
on its directions channel while its music channel is open, and it
plays music through nothing else (#35). A new car setting, off by
default, leaves the directions channel alone: each turn is mixed into
the music with the music turned down under it, or, when nothing is
playing, goes out on the music channel on its own under ducking focus.
Either side of the link may ping, and a real phone does. A 2021 Bolt
hangs up 25 seconds into every drive even with its own pings answered
and GM's channel open (#18), which leaves the phone's pings as the one
thing Android Auto sends that Gearslip didn't.
A surface encoder only makes a frame when the screen changes, and the
repeat-last-frame setting should cover a still one. On a Pixel 10 it
didn't: a LuChi box got 11 frames, then nothing, and stayed black
(#58). When the encoder has been quiet for a second, Gearslip now
draws its screen again, which is a new frame for the car.
The car list and the wireless status messages read the device's own name,
so a device renamed in Android's Bluetooth settings still showed its old
name. Prefer the alias, and sort the list by the name it shows.
Turned on under Settings > Connection, Gearslip's car screen fills the device's own
display as its home app. An All apps page opens any other app full screen, Back and
a head unit's keys work the car UI, and Phone hides on devices that can't call.
Phones never see Gearslip offered as a home app unless it's switched on.
From the moment the car's Bluetooth channel opens until the drive ends, a quiet
notification keeps Gearslip in the foreground, so Android lets it join the car's
Wi-Fi with the phone locked.
Neither runs on the car screen, but while one guides on the phone, Gearslip reads
its turn notification and shows the arrow, distance and road in the nav bar, and
sends the turn to the instrument cluster.
While Gearslip waits for the car to call, it also calls the car's own service every
8 seconds, for cars that publish it late. If the Bluetooth channel closes, the Wi-Fi
join fails or TCP can't reach the car before its screen comes up, the start-up
begins again, up to three times.
Seb3thehacker