Lilliput is getting ready to release their new 7" touchscreen that has native DVI and component digital out. Previous models such as the 629 had only VGA, Composite and S-Video.

CONNECT 2 COMMUNICATION is one of the biggest names in the
field of consumer electronics, information technology,
telecommunications, home appliances, office automation and
entertainment Around the World and is among the first transnational
corporations with a well spread out network of 31 retail stores and 9
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You don't need an expensive hybrid vehicle or car computer to get the most miles per gallon out of your car. Hypermiling is a set of techniques that maximize your MPG.

Thanks to Seagate - mp3Car had 3 EE25.2 80GB ST980817AM hard drives to hand out to forum members for their contributions to the mp3Car community. It was a hard decision, but the mp3Car forum moderators selected Malcom 2073 for his work on creating a Fusion Brain driver for Linux and DarquePervert for his valuable contributions across the forums.

Community development

IBUS interpreter - Community member Wanted has written a plug-in for Ride Runner that interprets BMW steering wheel button commands and relays them to your car PC. The plug-in is an attempt to improve on some of the issues he's experienced with the IBUSCOMM plug-in. It runs as a Windows service and allows the user to switch screens using the R/T key press. Support for up to 255 screens is available.
Don't own an I-BUS equipped BMW? You can build an IBUS-2-COMport adaptor! Read post #8 for discussion and a link to how-to.
Mac front end. The duo from down under, New Zealand brothers Stephen and Kevin Ramsay, have released ICE3 version 2.1, a front end for Mac that has quickly gained popularity on the OSX platform. Version 2.1 brings improvements to coverflow, native use of iTunes library, better video controls, among other improvements. The next version will begin to incorporate non-media functionality such as XM and OBDII. Read about it here.
One-click web cam recording. Want to know how to record from a web cam while on the go? Capture! is a one-click web cam application by community member Prefect. Currently, members are working on adding the ability to overlay information on the recorded video. (See a similiar project in OBDII, below) Read about it in a loooong running thread since 2005!
DVR capability for radio. Member Extide is working on a C# proof of concept application that allows DVR capability for radio or nearly any line-in source like XM Direct. He's targeting the SiLabs tuner, since that's what he owns. This is a work in progress, but head over and see what he's done so far.
OBDII

OBDII gauges - Member malcolm 2073 has released a GaugeDisplay application here. GaugeDisplay is a standalone app that provides gauges for frontends that may not have support for it but that do support external program embedding - like Ride Runner. Users can configure GaugeDisplay to display numerous values by editing the XML file.

Check out this Microsoft video of touch features in windows 7. It will be interesting to see how many car computer developers and touch screen fleet users implement these new features in their applications. The video certianly makes it look easy. More details are on the "Touching Windows 7" blog.


http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&play...wPlaylist=true

Here is the transcript to those two videos:

Hi. My name’s Rob Wray from MP3 Car. We’re doing this video blog today to give you some news. The PND, the Personal Navigation Device, it’s dying. It’s dying fast. I mean Garmin, Tom-Tom, Dash – say your final prayers. Even our beloved car computer has numbered days.

What’s killing them? A deadly virus? No. It’s an infestation. An infestation of millions of cheap globally-available connected devices. Never heard of such a device? Well, I bet you have. You have one in your pocket. This device, your mobile phone, combined with new hardware and software innovations, are allowing you to connect your mobile phone to your car and kill your Tom-Tom. Let’s go take a look.

So I’m sitting in a standard Toyota Scion. This happens to be a fancy aftermarket car stereo, but this could just as easily have been your standard display that came with your Prius or Range Rover or other luxury car. It also could have been a host of aftermarket radios and displays that have built-in video inputs.

Alright, so now that we’re in the car, let’s go through the process. You’ve got a couple steps here, some of which are already done. You take the video cable that you get from the Apple store and you plug that into the video input in the back of your screen. Again, this can happen in any car with a screen. You can go out and get an accessory adapter that takes this video input. So get the cable, plug it into your iPhone. Hack your iPhone which is about a thirty-minute process. There’s tons of websites that explain how you do it, and lots of developers have gotten together and made nice apps that make it really easy to do this

So hack your iPhone. Then you want to install an apps called Screen Splitter, which I’ll link below. Install Screen Splitter. That allows you to duplicate the content of this screen onto this screen. And then you install the app of your choice.

We’re going to do our drive test now with a little app called X-GPS. So both of these apps are in their infancy. They have a few flaws, but they’re really great in showing off this concept of why your Tom-Tom is going to die.

Let’s go for a drive. I’m going to run my Screen Splitter application. So now I’m sharing the video from my iPhone down to the car. I’m going to go ahead and run this little app here called X-GPS. It’s going to automatically tilt because it knows I have the screen in horizontal mode, which is then going to match the mode of the display down below. I’m going to go ahead and turn on my GPS signal. Aaah, I have to use the iPhone touch screen, and I’m going to go ahead and turn on my GPS signal, and off we go.

Let’s go for a drive. You think the most logical choice of applications would be Google maps. It’s built into the iPhone. The problem with Google maps though is that it doesn’t realign itself based on the horizontal position of the iPhone. So you can see that I’ve got maps running up here on top, but it’s displaying in a horizontal format down here. So let’s go take a look at some other apps that work well in the car.

So maybe your next thought is to use Google Earth. Well, Google Earth would be a great option except it crashes when you use it with Screen Splitter. So I’m not quite sure if it’s just there’s too much CPU load and Google Earth shuts off, but don’t use Google Earth. Try an app from a company called Earthscape. Earthscape’s app works great. It loads, it has the follow-me option, and it’s a great overview of where you are, give you some great side imagery while you’re driving around.

So let’s take a quick look at that. They have two modes. They have a pan mode and a follow-up mode which is perfect for driving. Let’s go for a drive.

Another great app I love to use in the car is Pandora. Let’s check this out. So we’ve got some Dave Matthews playing. [Music] You’ve got album art down here. All the Pandora controls on top here. The audio input comes through my device so I can control the audio levels right here on the device. The skip tracks. All these things that you can do with Pandora normally you can do and have it all amplified right here on the big screen.

So YouTube? Yep, that works, too. [Music] So any movie you have on your iPhone can also be played here, too.

Let me guess. You want to know how to get started. Okay. We’re going to need a couple of things. You’re going to need a cell phone that has video output. I happen to have an iPhone 3G, and you can buy this little cable over at the Apple store. It’s a little bit expensive, but it does some nifty things. It takes audio and video out, so this plugs into your iPhone, and this plugs into the audio and video input source in the back of your car.

So then your question is, how do you get audio and video into your car? Well, there’s a ton of aftermarket devices like this one here that’s made by Paq, but almost every car with a video screen has a device like this that you can install in your car and it has video and audio inputs to quickly allow any screen in your car to take the output from your cell phone. So get a cell phone with video output, get a cable, and get one of these adapters, and then you can get video in your car.

Now that we know that the PND is dying, you may ask what is the future of products in your car? Well, to answer that it’s going to be mesh-ups of existing consumer electronics hardware. In my right hand here I have a very simple wireless Bluetooth mouse from Apple. This is one piece of the future. In this hand I have a 7” touch screen, and this is just basically a four-wire resistive touch screen. And so what I think we’re going to see is we’re going to see hardware mesh-ups where electrical engineers and industrial designers mesh these two products together.

So we take the serial output of this touch screen display and we mesh it in with some Bluetooth wireless technology, and now we have a really quick instant aftermarket touch screen modification for your cell phone.

So now you can throw this guy, your cell phone, in your glove box with your video output device and then instead of even touching your cell phone, now you can control you cell phone with this wireless touch screen, so you can take it in and out between cars. It’ll be different sizes of screens manufactured based on what size screen that you have. Eventually multi-touch technology will be implemented in these aftermarket screen accessories. And that is just the beginning of the future.

Mark my word. Your cell phone will kill your Personal Navigation Device. It might take a year or two, but it’s going to happen. There are a million technologists and hackers that are visiting our website monthly that are getting technology like this into their cars.

Join them and help them kill your Tom-Tom and your Personal Navigation Device. This is exciting stuff. Thanks for watching our blog.

This document outlines the way to install a remote on/off button for your Mac Mini. This is a perfect fix for someone needing to install a Mac Mini inside a secure enclosure or a tight space, where limited access to the back panel is available.



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