Viability of a Nvidia Shield Tablet as a head unit
 

Had anybody looked at using a shield tablet as a head unit? I want to do a tablet swap into my brz , but I want something with some gaming oomph because sometimes for work I end up sitting in my car for several hours and would like to run emulators and other games while having my phone available for calls.

I'm leaving away from the nexus 7 because I want something that is more powerful, and the Surface 2 is a bit big, and outside my budget. $200 more than the shield. And the surface 3 is bigger than the car :)

I think a major problem you would run into is keeping the tablet charged, while in standby it may drain too much battery, especially over night. There are solutions to the nexus 7 2013 for this particular issue. I currently have one in my car and find the performance to be more than enough.

There's gotta be a way to do it.

And I want to run GCN emulators, and the nexus struggles with them.

I was actually pondering this yesterday. However, I think you'd have clearance issues..

Assuming my tape measure is accurate, the stock trim piece has an opening that's 202 x 103mm. I then looked at the product information of the Nexus 7 (2013 version) and Nvidia Shield Tablet to get both the tablet's overall dimensions and screen size (the size of the actual pixels you'll see when it's turned on). I'm at work and have the radio surround at my desk, but I don't have my Nexus 7 with me at the moment, so I haven't hand-verified the data, but this is what the math is saying:


Trim Opening: 202.0 x 103.0

Nexus 7 (2013): 200.0 x 114.0
screen size: 151.0 x 94.4

Shield Tablet: 221.0 x 126.0
screen size: 169.6 x 106.0


It seems the Shield Tablet would actually clip part of your screen (34 x 1920 would be lost).

Of course, if you're planning on going all-out and creating your own custom fiberglass dash enclosure, all of the above is moot.

I'm not opposed to a custom enclosure :)