Phil online

I’ve got the new carputer half-installed in my dinky little car. It’s running on a tablet PC I picked up for cheap. I bought a new license for iGuidance and installed it on there. It’s not perfect because it’s running Windows 98 and it crashes a lot. (Windows 2000 is more helpful at cleaning up resources you forget to release.)

But it works. And it has maps. And it knows directions. And it speaks.

It’s basically TomTom GO for only $200. (more…)

I had given up on the idea of a carputer in my little car. But I saw this ForSale ad on mp3car.com that piqued my interest. It was for an industrial tablet PC. It’s basically a 10″ touchscreen with a computer built-in, for less than half the cost of a 7″ touchscreen. How cool is that? And he has so many broken ones, he throws in a couple of those for spare parts.

It all arrived this week while I was out of town. I’ve only had an hour or so to play with it, but I like it so far. Here’s my write-up…
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Well, I’ll tell you why not: Money and Time

Don’t get me wrong. I love the carputer (more…)

I’ve had bad luck in the past with epoxy resins. You know, the kind where you mix the epoxy with the hardener in equal amounts, and it turns to plastic. It always turns to mush on me for some reason.

But I started making the mounting box for my DVD-ROM drive, USB ports and power switch. I got some epoxy, mixed it up, slapped it on the edges, and 10 minutes later it turned to plastic. It’s super cool. I must have had a bad batch before.

So I started the housing. I’ll have some photos up later. Now I need to put some parts-mounts in there and make it look all pretty.

I bought a slim-line slot-load DVDROM drive from this guy. I bought it sort of on a whim: I knew I needed one, I hadn’t gotten around to getting it yet, and a friend dropped by to ask about them. I said, “Oh sure you can get those. Here’s one for… um, $95 shipped, with the IDE adapter. I think I’ll buy it.” And I did.
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Yes, it’s time for a new carputer. Not that there’s anything wrong with the old one. It’s only 6 months old and it’s working beautifully. But it’s permanently attached to the minivan, my wife’s car.

This new carputer will be installed in my car, a 1992 Mazda Protege. And since I plan to replace this car soon-ish, I’ll make this carputer portable enough to move to my new car.

Requirements:

MP3 playback through stock head unit
Color GPS navigation
Touchscreen would be ideal

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I received my upgraded and hacked Tivo via Fedex yesterday. It’s not “illegally” hacked, as far as I can tell. Everything seems on the up and up. It has a bigger hard disk, the 4.x software, some extra third-party stuff installed, and the USB/WiFi enabled. I bought it on eBay. I probably overpaid for it, but I (more…)

I have had DirecTV service for about 9 years, Tivo for 6 years and Vonage for 2. I love them all dearly, but they don’t all work well together.

Well, DirecTV doesn’t like Vonage. It won’t complete its calls to the mother ship. Apparently this isn’t required for long-term service, though, as I haven’t completed a call in years, to my knowledge.

Tivo’s modem works just fine on Vonage. I really need Tivo to make its daily call, so I’m glad I don’t have any hoop-jumping to worry with there.
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I’ve had my carputer in active use now for several weeks. It’s been great. But here comes the first real challenge — I’m driving 10 hours for Thanksgiving holiday. I have 20 movies stored on the hard disk, but the kids have seen them all recently — in the car. They have their Game Cube to hook into the system, too, so that will help. I should rip more MP3’s onto the disk, but I have no time left. But I do have the daVinci Code audiobook handy. If only the kids won’t be listening.

This will be another test of iGuidance. I expect good results. I’ll try to report back after the trip.

Update:

The carputer saved the day! And it had some hiccups.

• 30 miles south of Nashville all traffic on I-24 came to a standstill. There was no way off the highway. We crept along for 2 hours before reaching an exit. Traffic was being slowly detoured down a small highway. We decided to take different roads on the other side of the highway which the carputer found for us using the internal maps and GPS. My luddite wife even said “Yay, carputer!”
• On the way home, we had a similar problem in Chatanooga. This time we were able to take an exit early on and avoid most of the snarl.
• I got to show off the carputer on the trip to many relatives. All were impressed.
• We did manage to get some more movies ripped to the hard drive, but it was close. It takes about 4 hours per movie right now. That will improve when I get the DVD-ROM drive installed.
• I actually forgot to upload all the states’ maps into iGuidance before we left. I was able to hook up an ad-hoc wireless network and copy them over from my laptop for the trip back home, but we made the trip up using StreetAtlas instead. Not bad, but not ideal.
• iGuidance locked up on me three or four times on this trip. It didn’t crash so much as completely stop responding to user input. I had to reboot the computer to get it back (since I don’t have a keyboard for Ctrl-Alt-Del.) I need to install a reset button for the carputer.
• iGuidance did find breakfast and lunch for us. It doesn’t have a great Restaurant-finder, but it did take us off the touristy-areas near the interstates. And I mean that in a Good Way.
• We listened to lots of radio shows I recorded with ReplayRadio. I like this application, but it still needs some work, mostly with the audio drivers.
• I used my brand-new 40GB MP3 player (Creative Zen Xtra) to carry some video content to the car. I figured I’d transfer it on the road. I had some trouble installing the drivers on the carputer, and when we got on the road, I found out they weren’t working at all. Damn! Later it occurred to me to try to download new drivers from the internet on my cell phone. I did, and it worked! It took about 20 minutes, but once the drivers and app were installed, I was able to copy the movies onto the carputer for our travelling pleasure. Sweet!

Here’s the next feature I need to add: Voice control. You say “Surf the web” and the computer brings up internet explorer. Way cool!

In particular, this app will voice-automate FrodoPlayer and iGuidance (navigation system). That’s what I need. I hope there’s not too much road noise in the car to be useable.

Some people don’t want to build their own carputer. Heck — I didn’t want to build my own carputer. But I knew that what was available didn’t do everything I wanted it to.

Well, that may be changing. (more…)

Hot damn! Someone told me about this but I couldn’t believe it was this easy. I don’t need to do enough mobile web surfing to have to pay for it. I mean, all the data plans available on my old carrier were like $20 per month for some limited connectivity. No thanks.

But on Verizon it turns out that you can use your (more…)

Someone’s developing a tool that tracks location and speed on the GPS constantly. It generates track files that you can later use to generate maps from www.gpsvisualizer.com.

Looks like I might need ComFoolery to make it work in tandem with the nav software. Maybe I can get the Nav software to always save a track instead…?

There’s another interesting looking GPS navigation package called Destinator. It has some advantages over iGuidance, foremost of which is an SDK which allows third-party frontends. Some have already been written for carputer installs. It also invites customization be letting you replace the voice prompts. And it has support for lots of countries, if you plan on taking your car international.

But it’s a bit more expensive than iGuidance, and the map displays have more detail on them — possibly in a Bad Way. I mean, I like detail if I’m trying to figure out how to get somewhere manually, but not so much if I’m counting on the software to do it for me. (Aside: check out the lawyer-bait on their site where it says, “driver-safe daytime and nighttime colors “)

Also, they seem to have abandoned the PC platform and are focusing only on Pocket PC and smart phones. Probably a smart move, but it makes the current version useless for me.

Maybe someone will send me a demo of the old version I can try out. Or maybe iGuidance will let me down and I’ll feel a need to switch. Until then I’ll just keep this on my potential options list.

I got fed up with Street Atlas‘ user interface. I mean, I’ve always hated it, but I didn’t know how bad it could be until I tried it on a touchscreen. I considered getting their new version (which claims to be easier for in-car nav) but it looks like their two big features are these: bigger fonts, and one button is bigger. Whoop-tee-doo.

So I bought iGuidance. The whole issue for me is useability, right? It has to be able to navigate (more…)

I fixed my touchscreen last night. There were so many places it could have been broken: inside the USB pigtail, inside the VGA/USB attachment cable, inside the multiple-input hydra cable, inside the monitor itself, or even the touchscreen control board. It turned out to be inside the (more…)

Eek! My touchscreen died. Someone tripped over the cable, so I think maybe it broke a wire. I’m trying to get the cable replaced, but it’s not going well so far. I’m in a race to see if I can get a new cable or repair the old one first.

The cable in question is for the Lilliput 8″ monitor. I guess it’s the (more…)

For my carputer install, I wanted a primary control monitor up front with a touchscreen. This would hopefully solve the need for a mouse, a keyboard, and a display all in one unit. I’m still trying to wean myself off the keyboard, but I have run the entire (more…)

I really wanted to run Linux on my carputer. Really. I was even willing to try to get my luddite wife to accept it. (It is her car, after all.) I could find a nice gui for it, I’m sure. But one thing help me back: GPS.

One primary function of the carputer is GPS navigation. And the map companies (more…)

This carputer is wireless. On the internet, anyway. I have a WiFi antenna mounted under the dash where it gets a remarkably good signal in my garage.

It also gets pretty good reception at coffe bars, restaurants and hotels that offer free internet. (more…)