Thread: Interesting Little Piece of Hardware......

That's a pretty cool device there. Only thing is, it is 150 bucks for 3 users. At that price, you could get 2 graphics cards with two outputs on each. The beauty of it is in the software thought. Getting that kind of virtualization on windows is pretty cool. You can do it for free on linux though with a few hours of tinkering with Xserver.

Yea it's definitely the virtualization that is most important. I don't want to just split the same video feed. I want to send different personalized content to each use and since the usb ports can be assigned individually to the virtual computers, I can use usb headsets so everybody hears and sees and even plays what they want, when they want.

There are of course some limitations and I'm sure I'll run into problems. BTW I'm weird I enjoy Microsoft products. Go figure right?

Also this would allow one to use all the nice windows frontends on the touchscreens which I like.

Yeah I like windows a lot too for a full-fledged desktop environment.

My car project, however, I'm doing a pretty serious amount of programming for.
Not only am I building my own front end, I'm building a tiny operating system for it too. I want a near-instant boot time and I'm also toying with the idea of doing professional car pc installs down the road and a no-maintenance operating system would definitely be ideal for such. I still haven't decided whether to base my operating system on linux or FreeBSD yet though. I'm thinking freeBSD because it is much more stable. //end thread hijack.

Lol no worries just glad someone posted on my first thread, otherwise i would be sad

Very interesting about your frontend/OS ideas. I wish you well. Do you plan on having it open source?

Well, due to licensing, if I base it off of linux, then it has to be open source (well mostly) and if I base it off of FreeBSD then a lot of it will definitely be open source. I'll probably just straight up leave the source code out there anyway. It would probably be useless to someone without programming knowledge though, because the operating system would be stripped down to only the drivers that I personally need and a lot of settings would be hard coded into it. Depending on whether or not operating system design starts to grow on me, I may make it easily configurable and provide a decent set of drivers with it.

Due to time constraints, my first setup of this car pc is going to be running windows xp with a basic front end that I'll program in C#. After that's in the car and working decently, I'll really step up and build the operating system.

As I go along, I'll probably end up releasing sections of code that I find useful, such as SpaceNavigator or FusionBrain control. At some point I want to turn an Ipod Touch into a remote control for it, so then I would release the source for the listener and the Ipod Touch application.

Object oriented programming.

Originally Posted by PaulF

Well, due to licensing, if I base it off of linux, then it has to be open source (well mostly) and if I base it off of FreeBSD then a lot of it will definitely be open source. I'll probably just straight up leave the source code out there anyway. It would probably be useless to someone without programming knowledge though, because the operating system would be stripped down to only the drivers that I personally need and a lot of settings would be hard coded into it. Depending on whether or not operating system design starts to grow on me, I may make it easily configurable and provide a decent set of drivers with it.

Due to time constraints, my first setup of this car pc is going to be running windows xp with a basic front end that I'll program in C#. After that's in the car and working decently, I'll really step up and build the operating system.

As I go along, I'll probably end up releasing sections of code that I find useful, such as SpaceNavigator or FusionBrain control. At some point I want to turn an Ipod Touch into a remote control for it, so then I would release the source for the listener and the Ipod Touch application.

Object oriented programming.

Should base the software around a multi platform language. Like Qt4. Free development environment. C code. Even ruby, which is fun to program in.

Easy to run in windows and linux.


I looked at the item that you posted about first. Not bad. But i didn't see USB connections on it? Each one did have ps2, vga and speaker. So really all you would need is standard headsets for each user. Would be cheaper then putting multiple pc's in a car. I would think you would want a fast pc to handle 4 users.

Good luck with your project.

p.s. not to put your idea down, but there are alot of front ends. Maybe you could help the carputer comunity by writing other usefull software? Some of the front ends have been in development for several years now, with great tested features and support. just my 2 cents...Or push more towards the linux environment since we lack great front ends for linux.

Originally Posted by pRoFiT

p.s. not to put your idea down, but there are alot of front ends. Maybe you could help the carputer comunity by writing other usefull software? Some of the front ends have been in development for several years now, with great tested features and support. just my 2 cents...Or push more towards the linux environment since we lack great front ends for linux.

The issue is, none of the front ends do what I want. If I'm playing a song on the computer in my house and I go out to my car, I want my car to pick up the playlist at that point. I want the computer to do certain things depending on where I am as GPS knows it, such as when I pull up my driveway, I want it to show me my garage door opening screen. I want the computer to be able to start the car. I want to be able to control most of my car's electrical devices such as windows and doors through the computer in a slick interface. I also want that interface to to be visible on an ipod touch, so that I can completely control the car from a hundred feet away. I also want all of this to boot in under 10 seconds. Theres also many other things I want to do, but this is my initial feature set...

Well I think this is awesome. Swiftdeath was nice enough to post this in my worklog. I have become so interested in this idea that I may update my MoBo so I can have 2 PCI slots, or even put in a second PC that is strictly for the task of supplying the ability of the users to each do what he/she wants. Switching the inputs can be done with a push button KMV switch or something along those lines...... God I hate when cool ideas like this come up... I just cant help myself.

Back in 2005, I built machines using Twin-something (I'll find the link later)... Anyways, it came with PS2 splitters for keyboards/mice and multiple users could do independent things on seperate accounts simultaneously in XP using the same exact hardware. Only special part was the motherboard. And it was only like $60 then, so cheaper...