My car computer thread.
#1
07-31-2005, 07:40 PM
My car computer thread.
Okay, I'm starting to build a car computer. I will use this thread to track the progress for anyone else interested in what I'm doing.
Wish me luck: I don't know if this project will ever get finished but I hope people can use what I post if they plan on doing something similar.
----
I figure there are a few around here that would be interested in the progress as I'm sure some of you just like to see things being created and tested and experimented with.
Wish me luck: I don't know if this project will ever get finished but I hope people can use what I post if they plan on doing something similar.
----
What I currently have and plan on using:
1 old laptop with a hard drive that doesn't work - looks like I'm going with a small desktop I got for free from work.
1 center console piece that is slightly damaged that I will be modifying to fit a touch screen monitor
Progress:
I currently have gps and voice recognition to switch screens of the computer. gps is crashing over time so that needs to be worked out.
Next steps:
Install Video screen in the car
Hardware:
-Video screen k90 ordered from ebay
-Dell Optiplex s260
-Plantronix microphone (not using it.)
-Labtec pc mic 333 (replaces Plantronix mic)
-Globalsat GPS SiRF Star 3 III Waterproof USB Mouse
Software:
-crossover office 6 beta
-Linux
-nGhost
-PyCar
-perlbox voice (I also installed sphinx2 and festival to make full use of perlbox)
-iGuidance for Pocket PC & PC (DVD)
-autoit
Updates:
10/12/08: Yup. Still working on this project. I finally ran power for the system using the fusebox and an amp install kit. I had an 12V gell battery I bought when I thought my car battery was dying, so I put it in my trunk and wired it up to the fusebox I put in the front of my car. Heh. It only took me 10 months to do that. I'm such a procrastinator. I also put the screen and computer in my car. I still have to tweek the software since the computer I'm using doesn't boot from a usb device and the install I did was on an external usb drive. It isn't a big deal in linux to fix this by having it boot from one drive and load the OS from another, and I'll probably do it during my break or lunch at work. When I do that then I will have a usefull (GPS will be working) carputer.
12/03/07:
Ordered a fuse box for the project. http://www.northeastmarineelectronic...OD&ProdID=2750
11/03/07:
After a lot of hair pulling I finally managed to get the video just right. I uploaded a photo of the prototype. Look for it in this thread.
10/22/07:
After a whole year I finally ordered the screen. I'm almost to the point where this is a reality.
10/12/06:
In the past two weeks I have fixed the GPS problem. Crossover Office 6 seems to have fixed the crashing. I am playing with autoit to automate zooming in and out of the navigation map. If I get that working well I may expand it to other navigation functions.
09/28/06:
I was having problems with the GPS program crashing but think I may have found a way to delay the crash to about 36 hours.
09/26/06:
Played around and was able to lop off about 10 seconds from the boot time. I removed all fancy graphics and graphics drivers from the kernel. I'm at about 20 seconds until I'm in a working screen.
09/24/06:
This weekend I replaced my plantronix microphone with a labtec one. The labtec is very accurate at about 6" vs the 3" for the plantronix. And it doesn't loose too much accuracy at about 3' you just have to talk louder. The plantronix is useless at 3' no mater how loud you shout.
I was able to get the voice recongition working pretty well (as good as oem systems I've seen). It is limited right now to changing between modes (I have 4 modes. Information screen, navigation, media, and obd-II)
Boot time seems to be growing as expected. I think I'm close to 30 seconds. I'm way over where I want to be.
On the plus side I took a screen shot of my working desktop so it kind of fakes it so it looks like the system is fully operational after only 5 seconds. One of the reasons the time keeps growing is because I'm not actualy using a watch but counting. I've been counting faster to try to force myself to get annoyed at the speed and put more focus on it.
09/22/06:
I've made a great deal of progress. Instead of looking for a front end I'm going with a window manager to switch between programs. I have the nav stuff working the way I want it. I'm not sure how much more I have to do on it except maybe try to decrease the boot time. My current boot time is around 30 seconds.
I think my next step is to get a motorized touch screen.
09/16/06:
The GPS reciever works great. I just plugged it in, did an apt-get install gpsd and it was working.
I installed a few gps program to test and had no problems. I even got iGuidance 3.0 running under a demo version of crossover office.
My boot time is currently 22 seconds to a usable system. I haven't loaded a front end for it yet so it might increase 2 or 3 more seconds.
So my staring point will probably be 24 seconds. I am going to try to get it down to 5 seconds but currently I have to add a 5 second delay to get the hard drive spun up. So if I can figure a way around that I will have cut aproximately 30% of the boot time.
Times that can't be eliminated
5 seconds to go through post
2 seconds to initialize the screen
That only leaves 1 second for loading all the code. I think I may be going over my 5 second limit, but It will be fun to see how close I can get.
09/14/06:
Software and receiver arrived. The receiver was up and running as soon as I installed gpsd. I tested with a few opensource projects and things worked well. I tried installing iGuidance under wine with no luck.
I then installed the crossover-office demo and iGuidance installed and ran. There seems to be some issues with it crashing over time that need to be investigated. But so far things look promising.
09/09/06:
Bought a GPS receiver and some nav software
11/16/05:
Bought a microphone to test out linux's voice navigation/dictation. I am using perlbox voice and it seems okay so far.
10/24/05:
Found out I have been scammed on ebay. The 4GB flash drive is a fake. The seller is no where to be found. I may "luck" out and it may be a 256M stick that I can at least experiment with but we will see.
8/10/05:
Flash drive came in. My first goal is to get a bootable OS on it.
8/9/05:
Found out that USB Flash drives only last for 1,000,000 writes per cell. I plan on running the OS from it and everytime you read a file it updates the last accessed date. This could kill a drive pretty quick I think. I've heard people say that their memory stick died after 6 months. The good news is I hear that doing a few things like loading the os into ram and running from there works well to preserve the stick, So does making the OS not update the last accessed time stamp. Also, moving the temp directory to ram helps to preserve the stick.
8/3/05:
Ordered 4GB USB Flash drive from ebay *gulp* (Turned out to be a scam)
FREE Old Dell Optiplex sx260 used.
$300.00 Motorized LCD touchscreen
$70.00 512MB DDR Ram
$30.00 Alipine ai-net to rca adaptor
$118.00 Sandisk USB pen drive (turned out to be scam and doesn't work)
$19.56 Plantronix audio 15 microphone (not going to be used)
$73.22 Globalsat GPS SiRF Star 3 III Waterproof
$99.99 iGuidance for Pocket PC & PC (DVD)
$18.00 labtec 333 microphone
$28.00 BLUE SEA 5025 ST BLADE FUSE BL6 CIRCUIT W/NEG BUS
http://www.northeastmarineelectronic...OD&ProdID=2750
$8.00 2 12v relays
$45.00 8 gauge install kit
Running total: $805.77
Wish me luck: I don't know if this project will ever get finished but I hope people can use what I post if they plan on doing something similar.
----
I figure there are a few around here that would be interested in the progress as I'm sure some of you just like to see things being created and tested and experimented with.
Wish me luck: I don't know if this project will ever get finished but I hope people can use what I post if they plan on doing something similar.
----
What I currently have and plan on using:
1 old laptop with a hard drive that doesn't work - looks like I'm going with a small desktop I got for free from work.
1 center console piece that is slightly damaged that I will be modifying to fit a touch screen monitor
Progress:
I currently have gps and voice recognition to switch screens of the computer. gps is crashing over time so that needs to be worked out.
Next steps:
Install Video screen in the car
Hardware:
-Video screen k90 ordered from ebay
-Dell Optiplex s260
-Plantronix microphone (not using it.)
-Labtec pc mic 333 (replaces Plantronix mic)
-Globalsat GPS SiRF Star 3 III Waterproof USB Mouse
Software:
-crossover office 6 beta
-Linux
-nGhost
-PyCar
-perlbox voice (I also installed sphinx2 and festival to make full use of perlbox)
-iGuidance for Pocket PC & PC (DVD)
-autoit
Updates:
10/12/08: Yup. Still working on this project. I finally ran power for the system using the fusebox and an amp install kit. I had an 12V gell battery I bought when I thought my car battery was dying, so I put it in my trunk and wired it up to the fusebox I put in the front of my car. Heh. It only took me 10 months to do that. I'm such a procrastinator. I also put the screen and computer in my car. I still have to tweek the software since the computer I'm using doesn't boot from a usb device and the install I did was on an external usb drive. It isn't a big deal in linux to fix this by having it boot from one drive and load the OS from another, and I'll probably do it during my break or lunch at work. When I do that then I will have a usefull (GPS will be working) carputer.
12/03/07:
Ordered a fuse box for the project. http://www.northeastmarineelectronic...OD&ProdID=2750
11/03/07:
After a lot of hair pulling I finally managed to get the video just right. I uploaded a photo of the prototype. Look for it in this thread.
10/22/07:
After a whole year I finally ordered the screen. I'm almost to the point where this is a reality.
10/12/06:
In the past two weeks I have fixed the GPS problem. Crossover Office 6 seems to have fixed the crashing. I am playing with autoit to automate zooming in and out of the navigation map. If I get that working well I may expand it to other navigation functions.
09/28/06:
I was having problems with the GPS program crashing but think I may have found a way to delay the crash to about 36 hours.
09/26/06:
Played around and was able to lop off about 10 seconds from the boot time. I removed all fancy graphics and graphics drivers from the kernel. I'm at about 20 seconds until I'm in a working screen.
09/24/06:
This weekend I replaced my plantronix microphone with a labtec one. The labtec is very accurate at about 6" vs the 3" for the plantronix. And it doesn't loose too much accuracy at about 3' you just have to talk louder. The plantronix is useless at 3' no mater how loud you shout.
I was able to get the voice recongition working pretty well (as good as oem systems I've seen). It is limited right now to changing between modes (I have 4 modes. Information screen, navigation, media, and obd-II)
Boot time seems to be growing as expected. I think I'm close to 30 seconds. I'm way over where I want to be.
On the plus side I took a screen shot of my working desktop so it kind of fakes it so it looks like the system is fully operational after only 5 seconds. One of the reasons the time keeps growing is because I'm not actualy using a watch but counting. I've been counting faster to try to force myself to get annoyed at the speed and put more focus on it.
09/22/06:
I've made a great deal of progress. Instead of looking for a front end I'm going with a window manager to switch between programs. I have the nav stuff working the way I want it. I'm not sure how much more I have to do on it except maybe try to decrease the boot time. My current boot time is around 30 seconds.
I think my next step is to get a motorized touch screen.
09/16/06:
The GPS reciever works great. I just plugged it in, did an apt-get install gpsd and it was working.
I installed a few gps program to test and had no problems. I even got iGuidance 3.0 running under a demo version of crossover office.
My boot time is currently 22 seconds to a usable system. I haven't loaded a front end for it yet so it might increase 2 or 3 more seconds.
So my staring point will probably be 24 seconds. I am going to try to get it down to 5 seconds but currently I have to add a 5 second delay to get the hard drive spun up. So if I can figure a way around that I will have cut aproximately 30% of the boot time.
Times that can't be eliminated
5 seconds to go through post
2 seconds to initialize the screen
That only leaves 1 second for loading all the code. I think I may be going over my 5 second limit, but It will be fun to see how close I can get.
09/14/06:
Software and receiver arrived. The receiver was up and running as soon as I installed gpsd. I tested with a few opensource projects and things worked well. I tried installing iGuidance under wine with no luck.
I then installed the crossover-office demo and iGuidance installed and ran. There seems to be some issues with it crashing over time that need to be investigated. But so far things look promising.
09/09/06:
Bought a GPS receiver and some nav software
11/16/05:
Bought a microphone to test out linux's voice navigation/dictation. I am using perlbox voice and it seems okay so far.
10/24/05:
Found out I have been scammed on ebay. The 4GB flash drive is a fake. The seller is no where to be found. I may "luck" out and it may be a 256M stick that I can at least experiment with but we will see.
8/10/05:
Flash drive came in. My first goal is to get a bootable OS on it.
8/9/05:
Found out that USB Flash drives only last for 1,000,000 writes per cell. I plan on running the OS from it and everytime you read a file it updates the last accessed date. This could kill a drive pretty quick I think. I've heard people say that their memory stick died after 6 months. The good news is I hear that doing a few things like loading the os into ram and running from there works well to preserve the stick, So does making the OS not update the last accessed time stamp. Also, moving the temp directory to ram helps to preserve the stick.
8/3/05:
Ordered 4GB USB Flash drive from ebay *gulp* (Turned out to be a scam)
FREE Old Dell Optiplex sx260 used.
$300.00 Motorized LCD touchscreen
$70.00 512MB DDR Ram
$30.00 Alipine ai-net to rca adaptor
$118.00 Sandisk USB pen drive (turned out to be scam and doesn't work)
$19.56 Plantronix audio 15 microphone (not going to be used)
$73.22 Globalsat GPS SiRF Star 3 III Waterproof
$99.99 iGuidance for Pocket PC & PC (DVD)
$18.00 labtec 333 microphone
$28.00 BLUE SEA 5025 ST BLADE FUSE BL6 CIRCUIT W/NEG BUS
http://www.northeastmarineelectronic...OD&ProdID=2750
$8.00 2 12v relays
$45.00 8 gauge install kit
Running total: $805.77
Last edited by tbaleno; 10-12-2008 at 08:56 PM.
#3
09-10-2006, 01:19 PM
Re: My car computer thread.
Originally Posted by tbaleno
carputer project back from the dead.
Bob Wilson
#4
09-10-2006, 01:35 PM
Re: My car computer thread.
There will be when I have some. As this is a prototype and I'm not good at documenting I will basicly be updating with what hardware I am using and what success or failures I am having. I probably won't go into details of assembly until after I get it all working and rip it down and do a final build.
I might post more when I get the gps and software installed.
I might post more when I get the gps and software installed.
#5
09-10-2006, 06:12 PM
Re: My car computer thread.
Have you considered a tablet PC? It is a very popular method of delivering after-market interactive integration for auto applications.
A friend of mine owns a specialty auto shop and adapts many of these "kits" for civilian and law enforcement units. Perhaps the higly integrated nature of a tablet PC can help a little (touch screen is included among other nice things) .
Cheers;
MSantos
A friend of mine owns a specialty auto shop and adapts many of these "kits" for civilian and law enforcement units. Perhaps the higly integrated nature of a tablet PC can help a little (touch screen is included among other nice things) .
Cheers;
MSantos
#6
09-10-2006, 06:27 PM
Re: My car computer thread.
I plan on having an indash touchscreen for navigation and stuff so a tablet PC would probably just be a waste. I think they cost a little more than a regular laptop.
I'm looking at a motorized touchscreen built in to where the radio goes.
I'm looking at a motorized touchscreen built in to where the radio goes.
#8
09-16-2006, 07:44 PM
Re: My car computer thread.
Nice.
How about looking into a solid state drive perhaps you can shorten the boot times by 10s?
I also assume you've leaned out the OS to include only what trully essential?
Cheers;
MSantos
How about looking into a solid state drive perhaps you can shorten the boot times by 10s?
I also assume you've leaned out the OS to include only what trully essential?
Cheers;
MSantos
#9
09-22-2006, 01:32 AM
Re: My car computer thread.
Solid state drives wear out too quickly when running an OS (too many read and writes). 5 seconds of my boot time is because I have to initialize the drivers for the usb ports. I realy want to do something about that.
I made an update today if anyone is interested.
I made an update today if anyone is interested.
#10
09-22-2006, 07:30 AM
Re: My car computer thread.
Originally Posted by tbaleno
Found out that USB Flash drives only last for 1,000,000 writes per cell. I plan on running the OS from it and everytime you read a file it updates the last accessed date.
