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’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.

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…)

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…)

I managed to pull power from the PSU on one of the hard drive connectors for the GPS antenna power. It takes 4-AA batteries, or it can be powered via Pin 9 on the serial cable. I ran 5 volts to pin nine on a patched serial cable, and it worked!

Now I want to do the same for the video monitors. (more…)

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.