CarPlay client application written for "AutoBox" dongles sold on AliExpress. Heavily influenced from https://github.com/electric-monk/pycarplay and https://github.com/harrylepotter/carplay-receiver, which are python client applications with similar objectives. The credit for the reverse engineering efforts on the "AutoBox" dongles and initial implementation goes to electric-monk (https://github.com/electric-monk) who wrote an HTML based CarPlay client for Tesla's infotainment system in pycarplay. A more native implementation was written by harrylepotter (https://github.com/harrylepotter) which was used to create a rough architecture for this application.
The application is written in Rust and depends on libinput and libmpv.
The application is split up into several "layers". You can loosely think of the interaction between the layers as an implementation of the Model-View-Controller design pattern. In this analogy, the "model" would be the "link layer", the "view" would be the "player_layer", and the "controller" would be the "input_layer". The "client" essentially encapsulates all three layers and orchestrates the communication between them.
I don't like most off-the-shelf car infotainment systems nor most OEM solutions, so I wanted to make my own fully fledged car computer. There certainly are thousands of projects aiming to do the same, but I wanted to learn about the challenges a car company (or more like the development team outsourced by the car company) faces while putting one of these things together. CarPlay is at this point a standard feature, so my infotainment system will be incomplete without a program like this.
While electric-monk and harrylepotter's implementations are a great base, I could not get the performance or feature set I desired in python. I also wanted to learn more about Rust, so I saw this as a great opportunity to work on my car computer and have a Rust project. Who says you can't have your cake and eat it too?
As noted before, this application would not be possible without the efforts of electric-monk and harrylepotter. I take no credit in reverse engineering the dongle's protocol nor the initial development of the client application.