Phil online

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…)

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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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.

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…)

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…)

Running the wires around the car turned out to be easier than I thought. First of all, most of them are under the dash. The carputer is installed there right below the radio, the GPS receiver is velcroed up under the dashboard plastic, and so on. The only complicated bits — the rear monitor and the rear video inputs — turned out to be (more…)

GPS Navigation! One the primary features of the carputer is live GPS maps and routing. I use Street Atlas — Road Warrior Edition, circa 2000. It works fine, but it has the most gawd-afwul user interface I’ve ever seen on a commercial product, bar none. Double that when all you have is a dinky touchscreen to control it. (more…)

My music collection is a mish-mash of formats. I have RealAudio files from 6+ years ago, Windows Media files, MP3 files, and some other oddities. Most players will only play a subset of these. (more…)

I chose the Opus 150w PSU because I couldn’t wait for the Carnetix 1280. The Opus is currently the recommended power supply to get. The reason: it works. It always works. It is intelligent enough to handle the carputer power up, graceful shutdown, and low-battery detection.

It doesn’t handle standby like I want, though. It keeps my drives, USB devices and fans powered in standby. I want all those to lose power. Just keep my memory powered. The new Carnetix PSU should address this. Maybe I’ll trade up when it’s shipping.

I used an amplifier install kit (from Circuit City) to bring power to my PSU. I tried to buy the parts separately since I didn’t need everything in the kit. But the fewer parts cost more than the kit. And I wound up using most everything in the kit anyway. Highly recommended. Just check your power drain and get the kit that’s designed for that size amp. 12 gauge wire worked for me.

Things I still have to do on my Carputer:

• Wire the rear monitor to pull power from the Opus PSU. (I wired the Touchscreen already.) This will give it a cleaner signal and keep it powered after the ignition is turned off. Also, it will survive crank.
• Install the DVD-ROM drive
• Replace the DVD-ROM drive (doesn’t seem to like CDs)
• Switch power-off timer to 60 minutes (now at 40 minutes)
• Replace the Opus with a Carnetix so standby can become useful
• Better GUI. Experimenting with FrodoPlayer now. Looks pretty sweet so far. Needs more tweaking.
• Trick out the Lilliput to power up automatically.
• Create playlists for all my multi-VOB file DVD rips.
• Reorganize my ancient music collection
• Build a frame for the DVD-ROM and the extra USB ports.

I’ll update this list in this blog entry as time goes on.