StevieG's Car PC Blog

Everything"s still working great. I"ve made a few additions to finish it off a little bit. I"ve been deep in thought and long term, I want to be able to use it "headless" – without a screen or display, and just ask whatever I want, and it respond. There"s nothing around to do that yet, so I will be doing it myself. I"ve got a few Visual C++ and Visual C# books so I read them, or just do it in VB6.

I"ve added two things this month. To keep the missus happy, cutting the car to pieces to fit it in is not an option. The car"s new anyway so chopping bits on the dashboard is a risky business so I"ve decided to keep the head unit. I"m happy with it anyway, the car is a special edition with pretty decent audio.

To get the sound into the head unit in Hi-Fi quality, I"ve invested in the Connects2 AUX adapter. It"s a special box that allows you to connect the Car PC audio into the CD-Changer input of the factory head unit. I was pleased to find it"s excellent quality – the Car PC audio is now as good as any CD – it"s refreshing to switch the car on and within a second (Thanks to standby on the Opus) have top quality sounds.

I"ve also invested in a proper mount – from Dashmount. They make specialist mounts for most cars to fit TFT screens and with little modification (simply screwing half of the original lilliput mount onto the dashmount) it"s fitted to my satifaction. The screen is now perfect – great position, great adjustability and it"s rock solid. Although fitting flush with the dash would be nice looking, the Dashmount position is much, much better for real-life use.

Over the past few days I"ve also been in code-monkey mode again helping James at Digital-Car.co.uk with organising a national UK Car PC meet, at a proper venue. Sometime in August/September we"re looking to have a UK-wide meet with attendance from as many as possible in the UK Car PC community. I"ve built a web application (that runs from this server, with the digital-car branding) that allows Car PC community members in the UK to add their location to a map, which dynamically chooses the best location, and suggests venues – all on the fly. It also allows us all to select which weekends we are all free, so we can narrow down when it is – all hopefully to guarantee a decent attendance. If you want to attend, you"ll need to register at www.digital-car.co.uk and look for the link in the UK Gatherings section – it should be posted in the next day or so.

Over the next month or two, I"ll be concentrating on software. I"m evaluating InfoMap Navigator Pro , courtesy of www.action-replay.co.uk to see what the programmable interface is like for using as a backend to the application I"m planning, so it will either be that or writing on MapPoint courtesy of my MSDN AA license. Either way it shoudl be interesting. The software will provide navigation, music, video (as others do) as well as tracking, internet communications, traffic, trip counter/mpg (without ODBII) and hopefully usable with and without a screen – fully voice controllable. I estimate that I"ll have something usable by September.

Refreshingly everything"s been working well for quite some time! Though, that should be a given really since i"ve been doing this for over a year now! So happy birthday Car PC. Didn"t buy it any cake though.

So for this news update, I"ll quickly run down what"s been achieved in the first year.

In the beginning, I didn"t really know where to start. The original setup, in my MR2 was carefully wired in, using a custom built case and custom built PSU. The screen was the cheapest available – a 5.6" video tft screen. Controlling it was a nightmare. The satellite navigation GPS interface was provided by a Road Angel unit which was wired into the system in a complicated way. Luckily the Road Angel is a seperate device again and the Car PC GPS is provided by a separate device.

As time went on, it has improved considerably and now boasts on the move real-time traffic data, satellite tracking and all the features required to equal a high-end head unit with touchscreen interface.

There"s still much to do. Integration with the Car ECU is almost here to provide the same functions top-end cars boast such as trip counters etc, with the added bonus of custom gauges to privde real time car info. I"m also close to building the Car PC unit into the car chassis itself and the touchscreen built into the dashboard. These have to be done as a logical step towards completion.

To tie it all together I need to write my own software interface, to tie it altogether. That"s also in the works too.

Anyway, let"s get back to what I"ve been working on this month…

Traffic Data

I"ve been working on getting real-time traffic data working on the move. This has involved writing both the back-end (which is working off this site and server) and the application. My application will interface with this, as will the VOICES software package written by a talented guy named Satish. I"ve written a basic application to do this which will come in useful immediately as months of roadworks are just about to start on my main route to work! To get this working on the move I"ve also had to install internet access in the car, using GPRS technology which works over the UK mobile phone network.

Satellite Tracking

A useful benefit of having internet access in the car is the ease of integrating an internet-based satellite tracking solution. I"ve had no problems writing a small application to do this. The main purpose of this is for research, however I have built a backup solution which doesn"t rely on the Car PC being operational or even in the Car in case of emergencies. I won"t go too much into that however as I"d rather keep it a secret just in case the wrong people are reading this. Suffice to say, I"m pretty well covered against both the casual thief and the thief who knows what they are stealing.

Video Camera

I haven"t decided on the purposed of this yet, either CCTV or reverse camera, probably the former as I don;t mind turning my head round to see where I"m going. I need to do a little work on this however to integrate it within the car in the right place.

FM Radio

As the Car PC nears completion it will replace the car stereo/head unit completely. And seeing as I listen to the radio a lot of the time in the car I need to be able to have this as part of the Car PC. The D-Link DRU 100 USB radio is well supported and very common in the Car PC community so it was an ideal choice.

New Case

I"ve purchased a Via Sereniti case as an interim case before I start the main integrated build. It"s a great Car PC case as the Opus 150W PSU fits inside it perfectly in the place fo the supplied PSU without any modifcation whatsoever. It"s also got room for a standard DVD-ROM drive to make things easier for me

GPRS Internet Access

As mentioned above I needed an internet access solution for use on the move. While it"s not really practical to drive around posting to MP3Car.com (though I did try while the missus was in the Chinese take-away) I need internet access for telematics. At the moment I have the traffic and tracking data, but eventually I"ll be adding various data such as weather, and up-to date local information. I"ve also got plans to build in software to provide a "buddy list" function a bit like MSN messenger but plots locations of other car PC users on the map who"ve chosen to share your location with you. Hey, I might be able to sell a solution to a taxi company

New Software

I"ve been in code-monkey mode the last few weeks and I"m only just getting started I"ve written the Traffic application, which is mainly a proof of concept and a test application for the tracking. I"ve also released some basic code to the community written in Visual Basic to interpret GPS data just in case anyone else wants to write their own software but doesn"t know where to start.

So the rest of this month will be writing code and looking for a new middle bit for my dashboard to cut up and fit the lilliput in and looking on ebay for a cheap 4-channel amp If you want to sell one for less than £50 quid email me!

New Website

The move to a new website is now complete. I"ve been through a couple of web providers in the last couple of months and there is no place like home. SIck of having to live within a hosting providers constraints the site"s now hosted back upstairs in my house. You"re looking at a locked down Windows box running Apache, PHP and MySQL running a cron service for some of the back-end all locked down as tight as if they were on a unix box. I"d obviously prefer to host on a Unix box but the Windows box gives me some extra flexibility with regards to plotting maps and processing certain kinds of data for serivces I wish to provide in the future. To save my bandwidth I"ve uploaded all images and downloadable files to my ISPs web server as it"s a waste of my connection to serve them from home! The site itself has been updated considerably and as you have seen new sections added. Hope you like it.

A note to members of the mailing list, if you joined on the MR2 site you will need to re-subscribe. This is because I"ve changed to a outsourced mailing list provider and I also know some of you may have been intersted only because it was an MR2. If you want to receive new mailings from me, you will need to re-subscribe.