It’s all going well…
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.
