So there have been some nice advances so far, and we have made up some good groundwork.

Currently as it stands Joel's car has been outfitted with the O-Droid, Display, DAC&DSP Stack, and all required amplification, and currently playing audio tracks without issues (and they sound good for not calibrating anything yet!).

The steps that were done (and I'll keep this as chronological as possible) are as follows:

1. Complete all DAC/DSP mounting and testing into suitable project box, and complete a "break in test" (the break in test was more for my verification purposes)
2. Wire the car so all speaker cables go to the rear (as thats where all the amps are).
3. Wire the optical cable and USB cable from the DAC/DSP to the front for audio and control/programming purposes.
4. Get all power wiring ready to go for DAC/DSP from existing wiring in the rear
5. Install the things that require external trim work/modification.
   
   1. In this case, the existing shark fin antenna was modified to do GPS instead of SAT Radio, we swapped the modules with a little persuasion from a Dremel, and ran the wires under the headliner (or above, depending on how you want to look at it).
   2. We also were installing a rearview cam to a rearview mirror with an LCD in it, and we elected to do that at the same time (as we would have all kinds of stuff already ripped out of the interior anyway).
6. Fabricate the facia/mount for the LCD Panel and O-Droid.
7. Mount O-Droid and all associated parts, and panel together in dash. Close the dash up all nice and tidy.
8. Enable all channels on DSP.

At this point, this is where we stand. Everything is baseline functional and sounds pretty good. Next steps, are integrating a front panel button and knob control, a micro-controller (Arduino), and a few small odds and ends. Once all the hardware has been completed, the software should be almost done.

My personal challenge in all of this, is learning KiCAD to make the circuit board(s) for the front panel control. It's starting to come together, and thankfully it probably wont be too expensive in case I screw up horribly... but I'm trying to avoid a lot of silly mistakes I see and read about all the time. So for the time being that is slowly marching on, but at least we have something to really test on and perfect before we bring more hardware/software into it. Once the KiCAD drawings are complete I may post those. See the gallery for some more updated pics of the projects.