The Mp3Car Blog

 mp3car's Robert Wray interviews GENIVI's board member Joel Hoffman in a 2 part interview.
Part 1 of 2 covers:
What is GENIVI, How did it start?
What are the first topics GENIVI will address?
What is the Link between GENIVI, Linux and Moblin?
What are the costs?

Part 2 of 2 covers:
What actually is the GENIVI scope?
What areas do you expect to cause conflict and how will association conflict be handled?
Why are parts of development closed?

Talk about this on our forums

 Robert Wray from Mp3car is in Detroit at the “telematics update” show. Our forum users are almost always about 3-5 years ahead of most automotive labs and public displays. This development gap makes these events sometimes feel like big industry group hugs, but every now and then there are a few gems. Want to hear about something specific?

Post your questions in the forums

CNX-P2140 Overview and Installation

Goal

Demonstrate what all the input and output wires (J1 and J2) on the P2140 do and where to connect them. We'll also provide a quick overview of the jumpers that control how your primary and secondary output rails behave.

Learn

Understand where the input and output wires connect to. Learn how to connect the P2140 to a bench battery for testing purposes and measure the output voltages. Also a quick introduction to multimeters.

Equipment

CNX-P2140, a bench battery (or an extra vehicle battery), a multimeter (optional) 

Next Time

How to splice your AC/DC brick to power your laptop/mini computer.

 Click to listen to an interview with Rob Wray and Angelo Rajadurai from Sun

"Interestingly enough what we’re seeing is, you know the cloud is maturing really, really quickly and especially in the space of startups where you see all these great innovations happening.  Cloud is making life much easier for new companies to come in and provide services, so especially in the mobile space where it’s again a budding technology where there’s a lot of these services that are possible."

- Angelo Rajadurai

 ... To read the entire transcript visit our forums

CNX-P2140 Overview and Installation

Goal

Demonstrate what all the input and output wires (J1 and J2) on the P2140 do and where to connect them. We'll also provide a quick overview of the jumpers that control how your primary and secondary output rails behave.

Learn

How to quickly wire and configure the P2140.  

Equipment

Screw driver, electrical tape, multimeter (optional), wire strippers, p2140

Next Time

How to splice your AC/DC brick to power your laptop/mini computer.

If you don't have quicktime you cand download The future of car computing.mp3

Hi my name is Robert Wray from Mp3car.  Throughout the summer we are going to dive deeper into the future of mobile computing, car computing and telematics with a series of video blogs exploring new technology and interviews with leaders in the space. 

Based on our activity in the community,  our work with automakers, aftermarket, communications and telematics companies, we believe consumers will demand a bunch of new features all seamlessly integrated into a replicable, flexible UI and accessible from many devices of varying power, age, screen size, and interfaces.  


The feature list will include.
•         Connected navigation  (Internet POI, Real time traffic, regular map updates)
•         Media & entertainment from the internet or internet connected devices
•         Interfacing with other technology (engines or batteries, GPS and other location indicators, other sensor hardware)
•         Extensible developer interfaces to allow rapid add ons and integrations with existing features
•         Demand for skinable and user customizable interfaces
•         Occasionally connected devices (wireless, USB, WIFI, sneaker net)
•         Demand for flexible audio and visual prioritization
•         Flexible Security & Personal privacy awareness & settings
•         Task aware user interface, for example -  user taking a bus, driving, walking, sitting down
•         All of the above components, including the UI should be modular and replaceable at any time to make way for new innovations.

Through our video blogging and interviews we plan to find out what it is going to take to make these features a reality and follow the activity of our community members as these bleeding edge features get implemented.

Questions?  Talk about this on our forums .

Some forum members were already talking about this mobo but I thought I would shine some light on the subject. I had a chance to play a little bit with it and see if it's working etc.

 Form factor Mini-ITX /micro-ATX compatible

Processor Integrated Intel® Atom™ processor 330 with a 533 MHz system bus

* One 240-pin DDR2 SDRAM Dual Inline Memory Module (DIMM) sockets
* Support for DDR2 533/667 MHz DIMMs
* Support for up to 2 GBΣ of system memory

Chipset Intel® 945GC Express Chipset and
Intel® I/O Controller Hub 7 (ICH7)

* Eight USB 2.0 ports
* Two Serial SATA ports (3.0 GB/s)
* One parallel ATA IDE interface with UDMA 33, ATA-66/100 support
* One serial port
* One parallel port
* PS/2* keyboard and mouse ports

I tested this board with the following config:
- 80 gig seagate SATA hdd
- 300 w power supply
- 2g of DDR2 800MHz Buffalo ram (1 stick)
- Dell mouse and keyboard (both usb)
- memorex external DVD via usb

The board was able to install XP Home flawlessly, and so far, is very quick. Startup time 46.8 seconds and shutdown time was 8.5 seconds.

You can't look at this board without comparing it to the previous LF2 model.
Unfortunately the only thing I was able to find, along with others here on the forum, the S-Video is the only difference. The previous model has it and is priced on newegg for 79.99 and this model doesn't have priced at 76.99 on newegg.

So it seems for $3 less you can get a board without S-Video. Why not include DVI or display port on the next model?

Talk about this, and see other pictures on our forums

Best of Mp3car.com community innovation and development

Ride Runner

The community is helping DocBreezy bring a sleek new skin, named '506' to Ride Runner .  by DocBreezy.  Picture: http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/imagehosting/14883749a87d9096277.png  In addition to suggestions and beta testing, Treetop, Thunderstick, blk02si, Sonicxtacy02, GizmoQ, carputer1are lending a hand with advice and code support to bring it along.

506 also builds on the flexible plug-in architecture of Ride Runner by using:
   - RRGas -Enforcer's gas price finder for US and UK
  - Movietimes - a plug-in that retrieves movie times for your zip code (US only)
  - Coverjuke -  an implementation of Coverflow for Ride Runner.

  - MyMobiler   is a Windows mobile phone control program that can be controlled from the skin.

Community Development

Just in case you don't hang out on mp3car.com forums 24X7, you may not be aware that there is a flourishing open source car PC environment for Linux called nGhost. 

Version 2.0.0 is details are available here   and kev000 is one of the lead developers for a team of like minded community members including:

tripzero
kshots
kantlivelong
psy_cho
billygalbreath
eubey
gladier

among others.  You can find the nGhost download here

Shift by wire: Automated P-R-N-D-L - Member turbocad6 is at it again with a plan to replace his automatic shifter.  The community has been tossing around ideas about how to do this and ways to implement it.  Right now, it looks like an Arduino board and a linear actuator will do the job for push button shifting.  Got something to contribute?  turbocad6 will need help programming and engineering.  Check it out . 

Towards a more flexible front-end.  The front end is the software that ties together all of the functions that the computer offers into an easy to navigate and control 'face' for using the computer while driving.  There are numerous front ends (Ride Runner, Centrafuse, nGhost, Streetdeck as examples).  This thread   is a brainstorming discussion about how to create a more flexible front end that requires less configuration and tinkering yet runs across platforms.  If you've got ideas or want to see the community at work on an idea, stop by and check it out!

Lovely when a plan comes together.  Check out member malcom2073's new front end, CarPal.  The community is helping him to lay out a plug-in scheme for the front end, and Sonicxtacy02 is working on a skin for the new front end.  A great example of the community helping to develop a software product .

Skype for RR

Member lambosprit is at it again.  As if solving the bluetooth problem wasn't enough, lambosprit has a basic plug-in for Ride Runner that brings Skype functionality to the car PC.  It makes and receives calls between both Skype users and external phone numbers.  Check it out .

Covermess

Member pcpete has developed a plug-in for Ride Runner called Covermess.  It's a Flash app that displays your albums in a pile, as if they were real CD's.  You can select and play music from them, similar to the Coverflow display on an iPod.  Check out the video in the first post for what it looks like.  A really nice bit of programming ! 

The Unexpected

From spud cannons to automated pyrotechnics controllers   the community continues to innovate and develop new and very unexpected uses for hardware.  Find out how a plastic toolbox and a Fusion Brain = pyrotechnics controller.

The Fusion Brain is one of the most popular hardware add-ons for community members.  Developed by two of the community members, 2k1Toaster and greenman, the FB allows your computer to interface with the outside world in both analog and digital fashion.  Using standalone software, the FB can be programmed to read temperatures, control relays, stepper motors, infrared sensors and so forth.  Car PC'ers use them to operate windows, switch relays on and off, read temperatures and even control Christmas lights on their car

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.

What is great about this monitor is that it's now extra versatile. They left the pigtail plug on the monitor and just added the extra DVI and component cables. That means you have the option to output to 5 different video sources, DVI, VGA, composite, component and s-video.

The connectors for DVI came out of the bottom of the unit, whereas the pigtail connector came out of the side. So this may affect some installations but just be aware that it *may* be changed.

The digital output was, in our opinion, more defined in terms of the colors. More specifically the blacks were blacker and the whites were whiter.

The only down side we noticed is that the DVI output seemed to have off colors. The ocean in the video seemed very green, even though on VGA it was blue.

All the settings for the test were brightness 50% Green 50% blue 50% and red 50% with a resolution of 800x600. They ran from the same ATI graphics card playing BBC's blue ocean on VLC player.

This product should be coming soon to the mp3Car store, so look out for it.

If you have any thoughts on the monitor talk about it on the forums

http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/mp3car-blog-talk/132265-new-7-inch-dvi-touchscreen-lilliput.html

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.

Some common techniques are:
Don't drive aggressively
Don't go over the speed limit
Avoid traffic
Avoid coming to a complete stop
Try to accelerate as slowly as possible
Using neutral when going down hills

Some uncommon techniques are"
Drafting behind trucks
Using centripetal force to go around turns fast
Over-inflating your tires to reduce friction

We took a look at how what kind of MPG we got out of our Toyota Matrix when doing basic hypermiling around town.  We averaged 61 MPG when hypermiling and 27 MPG when driving normal.  At some points on the trip going down hill in neutral we got up to 247 MPG.

If you have any of your own techniques or stories of your own hypermiling talk about it on our forums.
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/mp3car-blog-talk/132086-hypermiling-cheap-using-iphone.html#post1311452