By: Sean Clark on 06-12-2009 in Technology Events



Rob Wray from mp3Car interviews Artur Seidel from Elektrobit.

The following questions are addressed:

What is Elektrobit?
How do different navigation components work?

If your a developer, what volumes will you need to buy into to develop with Elektrobit?

Do you take any traffic feeds right out of the box?

How is Elektrobit distinguish itself from the competition?



By: Robert Wray on 02-24-2009 in How To Videos



How to build your own wireless USB monitor - We took an IOGear wireless VGA device (GUC2015V), an M1-ATX, a Lilliput 10” monitor and a laptop battery to make a super hacked wireless monitor. If you spent more than an hour on this you could really make this hack usable. We couldn’t get more than 15’ of range out of this with line of sight, but it was fun to try. Based on the amperage of the devices, we could theoretically get a few hours out of this per charge.

***Update 2-26-2009
Other power supplies that could be used:
The m3-atx is probably a better supply to use for this project.

How much Power does this use?
260 milli amps for just the receiver.
1.1 amps for the receiver and screen.
Our battery has a capacity at 14.8 volts of 6600mAH.
Does this mean we get 6 hours of run time? Wow.

Host CPU Loads tested on my desktop
DisplayLinkManager is what does the processing for the Wireless VGA adapter.

Hardware used for testing
3 year old 2.8 Ghz Pentium D Dual core CPU
4gb of Ram
Windows XP
800x480 output

CPU Load Results
0% - CPU load with an idle screen (desktop only)
0-2% - CPU load with google talk
2-3% - VLC movie paused
9%-12% - VLC playing a movie



Part 2 Video Transcript:

Hi. My name is Rob Wray with MP3 Car. I told you we would test out this wireless monitor in the car, so for the last hour we’ve been goofing around in the parking lot of our office trying to get this to work. And actually it worked perfectly right off the bat the same way as it did work in our office. I just wanted to do something off-the-wall with it.

So it’s working perfectly. I happen to have a Centrifuge help video loaded on the monitor right now. We’ve got a great wireless signal. We’ve done some calculations recently. We think this little hack job here can get about six hours of wireless time using the 10” monitor. So that’s pretty exciting. And we’ve been really happy with the video quality playback.

The first thing that we tried to do to hack it, to make it look kind of cool and newsworthy was to hack in a USB HDTV tuner. So we did that. It worked well except the HDTV won’t play on this monitor. There’s certain things that don’t work well over ultra wideband USB and apparently the GT HD tuner that we sell in our store is one of those things that doesn’t work well.

We also had some problems with getting StreetDeck to work well wirelessly over ultra wideband, but things like VLC which I used in my previous demo worked wonderfully. You get great frame rate playback, and that sort of thing. So I’m going to go ahead and start this movie here, and you can see that the picture quality’s pretty good.

So we’ve been pretty happy with this as a solution. The only thing that we’ve seen is that, again it doesn’t support all video formats, and you also get – every now and then you’ll get a little bit of a wiggle over here on the left side. I’m assuming that’s from some type of interference that’s happening as a result of the engine alternator or various other little things. But it was happening before and now it’s completely gone away, so I think it’s almost unnoticeable.

So try this at home. Thanks for watching our blog.



By: Robert Wray on 01-14-2009 in Technology Events



Tom Berry (bugbyte) and I talk about our closing thoughts on CES 2009. The main theme this year from CES is having all of your devices connected and having location aware content. The biggest challenge is going to be for device manufacturers and software developers to create products which will deliver this explosion of data in a way that users can consume it. These products must be aware of the users activity and location. For example, if you are sitting down you will consume and control data in a different way than you would if you were walking or driving a car. Our favorites from this year were Airbiquity's innovations, Intel SSD, and the hardware that Giantec is developing for themselves(here and here) and for Intel. We are also very excited about the possibilities that ICO's satellite system opens up.



By: Robert Wray on 01-08-2009 in Technology Events



By: Robert Wray on 01-08-2009 in Technology Events


The CES 2009 show floor opens today. We are writing from the press lounge on the show floor and our first video is uploading now.

For this show, our main areas of focus:
  • In Vehicle, mobile computing technology
  • Audio, specifically amplifiers with optical or digital inputs
  • New Display Technology
  • What technology can be transported from Home theatre into car computing?
  • Car Computer Software

Expect a few slightly off topic eccentric things as well.

Talk about this on our forums or give us tips on what to shoot here:




By: Robert Wray on 11-18-2008 in Technology Events



Goce and Rob talk about the highs & lows of mobile computing technology at SEMA 2008. Talk about this Here.



By: Robert Wray on 11-04-2008 in Technology Events



Everyone has been setting up for SEMA for the last 3 days. I happened to walk by the Hyundai booth yesterday while one of the vice presidents was rehearsing for their 9:30am press conference today. They had the usual un-blanketing of cars and performance celebrities there to talk. What I was really there for was the car computer geerkery. The real details about this project will have to wait until Tuesday when the real press conference starts, but here are some sneak peek photos.


I am already slightly disappointed with the mac install. It seems like more of an attempt to get press than a functional implementation. I saw one of the macbook airs plugged into an AC port which would imply no ignition integration. It is always harder to put in a DC-DC regulator. Why do installers just use inverters especially on a high profile car like this? Is it laziness or unknown technical mojo that is driving this?
Answer this question and talk about this install on our forums.
If there is hot mobile computer tech at SEMA that we haven’t written about, Let us know.
For you Hyndai or Genesis addicts I posted a quick 1m video of their VP practicing, unveiling a car and doing a quick dance. See the forum post for more details.



By: Robert Wray on 08-01-2008 in mp3Car News



My name is Robert Wray. AKA Fiberoptic on our forums. This nic goes way back to the original days of MP3Car when I had a super speedy uncapped 10mb cable modem in 1996 and nobody else was on the Comcast pipe. For the last 4 years MP3Car has consumed an average of 70-80 hours a week of my time. Before MP3Car became my life I worked at a small technology consulting company. I scoured the net for travel bargains, toured the United States and 12 other countries. I sailed on friend’s boats, rock climbed, and enjoyed the outdoors.



Most of my work days at MP3Car consist of reading and replying to sales questions, reading the forums, testing new products and filling in where ever the rest of the team needs help. Currently we have two lab cars that we test things in. The original Toyota Highlander Hybrid which we used with Intel @ CES 2006 and a 2006 Scion TC(prototype dash photo below). My desk is also normally an explosion of technical parts, paperwork, projects, test equipment and ideas in progress.


Recent public reviews of products I have tested are the SIIG , M4 ATX software and the Garmin Mobile PC.


Expect more of these reviews on a regular on a basis as part of our blog.

Many of you may have noticed that MP3Car has been undergoing changes over the last 6 months. One of the biggest changes here is the separation from our StreetDeck product which occurred in mid July. This separation will allow us to support all software efforts as well as redirect resources towards the growth of the community which has grown to 1.1 million posts and 101,000 global users.

We hope to roll out several community upgrades before the end of the year. I believe one of the most important things we are doing is creating this new blog. A blog is the first of many infrastructure improvements that will allow us to more openly share information about the growth of MP3Car and exciting new things happening in mobile computing.

All of the MP3Car team will be contributing to the blog on a regular basis as well as an occasional guest blogger. If you any ideas that you think should go on the blog, please send me an e-mail.

Discussion about the MP3Car Blog will occur in this new forum which has been created here.



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