As long time members on our forums, this team really shares in the passion for car computing. They have made an amazing prototype of their product which is on display at CES this year. Final units are expected in April. The unit without a rear seat entertainment (RSE) system will retail at $2,750. Add on an RSE package and it will cost $485 more. This may seem pricey, but they have made some custom cables and hardware devices which should help simply and speed up the installation process. Dashboard devices has 2 units being road tested in Amsterdam now. They have made some great progress with this product but as some of us know, one of the hardest things to do is move this from the 1-2 trial stage to being able to make, sell, market and support car computers at a larger scale production level. This is where most companies struggle. There are many companies who have failed completely and others who have announced product and several years later never released anything. We will talk more about the difficulties of bringing a car computing product to market in a later post.
Talk about this on our forums:
We expect to see lots of Intel based car computers at CES this year. VIA always has embedded platforms which can be modified to for the car, but other than the embedded products it seems like they have disappeared from the car-computing world now that Infill has died. The Guru units and its close cousin the Azentek cpc will be in at least 6 cars this year. Intel's new series of Mini-itx based boards has been a huge hit for prototypers, telematics labs, and hackers. We even based our telematics lab bundle of this line a few months ago.
At the telematics seminar today we had a discussion with the director of Intel’s IVI director Staci Palmer. There are no car computing or Telematics PR events planned this year for CES. They do however have a dashboard mock up in the Intel booth, which we will report more on later. From our discussions it also seems like Intel is going to be putting more effort behind their in vehicle version of moblin. An open source active in vehicle linux app would do wonders for in car technology.
The biggest barrier to entry I see for Linux in the car for things like moblin is a navigation solution. How can anyone put linux in their car without nav? I guess you could use virtual machine for your navigation…or buy a pnd? That’s what I call a speed bump.
Designed with the supprot and feedback of our community, the fusion brain guys have done it again – At midnight EST today they released version 4 of their fusion brain control center.
Improvements over Brain v3:
16 Digital Outputs
13 Analog Inputs
Selectable Power Source (USB or 12vDC Jack)
30% smaller form factor (70mm X 45mm)
Better power filtering and protection
Ability to update firmware via USB
Ability to update firmware via ICSP header in event of bootloader corruption
Improved signal routing for analog inputs
Pulse Width Modulation, 256 steps with 42uS minimum pulse width (may need firmware update, provided free and uploadable over USB)
Previous versions of the fusion brain have been used for:
Some people call OLED the next best thing in display technology. Manufacturers report very high levels of contrast and lots of sunlight readability. What do you think? Is OLED the next home run in mobile car computing and telematics display technology? Talk about this on our forums here.
We go for a drive as the Cruisecast team shows us the guts of their prototype device and an example of their buffering technology. Talk about this on our forums:
The CEO of Raysat/Cruisecast (AT&T partnership) gave us a 20 minute technical explanation on the satellite, antennas, transponders, compression and how they have made CruiseCast “cruise” . A product overview can be found with the interview of Cruiscast’s President . There are more technical details in our CruiseCast drive test video.
Even thought this isn’t super techie, we decided to take a few minutes to check out rescue tape since they won an award this year.
Where was wardrobe in this scene? My collar is sticking up and my shirt is wrinkled. Expect a blast of videos over the next 2 days. I slowed down editing a bit to attend a three day
wedding over the weekend.
AT&T & RaySat kick off satellite service “CruisecCast” for the car. Mp3car interviews RaySat’s President, Winston Guillory in HD.
In a three-part HD video interview, mp3Car interviews AT&T’s and Raysat’s “CruiseCast” executive team today.
We are going to kick this off this three-part interview with President, Winston Guillory. Later this week we will post the rest of the interviews with their Chairman & CEO as well as a drive test through the Vegas streets. The CruiseCast team was also kind enough to show us all the innards of their prototype hardware, which we will share with you later in the week as part 3.
Mp3car typically focuses on mobile computing applications. The reason why this fits on our blog is that Brian from Palmer Performance has ported his car PC OBD and performance application to the iphone. This is a two part interview. The first part is going to be a tour of his new iphone application. We will follow this up later in the week with a tour of his carpc installation and the features of his car computer software. Brian has made some interesting hooks in his windows application that will allow for integration into roadrunner, centrafuse or other applications. Talk about this on our forums here
Michael, product planner at Hyundai gives some specs on the
New Hyundai genesis. He talks about Apple in the car, the future of car computing and connector services as well as the tour they
have planned with Rides Magazine in NY city. Talk about this on our forums
This question has been asked over and over again so we decided to film the answer in HD as a way to test out our new camera. We have filmed the assembly of our telematics bundle.
Why is this the ultimate bench test? I got to sit outside with 70 degree fall weather in the Boston Commons – On a bench. Ahhhh.
For those of you who are regular readers of our blog, I promise we will get back to more car computing content soon. We are one of the few people in the country who have active wimax hardware so there is almost a sense of duty that has set in.
Xohm's Baltimore Wimax hardware is working in Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Northern Virginia, and Baltimore.
Solrackm’s previous comments and reports of Xohm working in DC inspired me to go down and hear it from the horse’s mouth. I walked down to Xohm’s booth at the Baltimore Fells Point Festival which happens to be steps from Michael Phelp’s new house.
Here is the technical dirt from Mike who works at Xohm (not Mike Phelps). Xohm networks are active in Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Northern Virginia and of course Baltimore. Mike and his coworkers warned me that the networks will work but are “not supported” and are still being tested. They did say my Samsung expresscard wimax hardware which I bought last week will work even in Chicago which is using Motorola tower equipment. To my knowledge, no coverage area has even been posted for these regions.
For those of you broadband geeks our there, it might be time to UPS air your Baltimore wimax hardware in for your fix of wimax geekery.
I am flying to Boston on Wednesday with my Baltimore hardware. When we get there I will let you know how it works at the airport and surrounding suburbs.
Talk about this in our Wimax Forums where this was first reported by one of our users.
My friend Mary checking out Michael Phelps’ new ~1.4 million dollar house around the corner from Xohm's Booth.
One of our forum users, Solrackm, is reporting that Xohm is now live in DC and Northern Viriginia for Wimax users who have purchased their equipment in Baltimore. Apparently xohm is not actively being sold, but the network can be accessed while it is in "test mode" It looks like things are happening fast. Xohm had a realitively big mobile sales setup at Baltimore's Fell's Point festival. Talk about this in our wimax forums.
My name is Nick or Reno91011 on the forums. I'm a summer intern with Mp3Car. Before hearing about Mp3Car through my brother, I had no idea of what was possible with an in-car computer, but after reading through a large amount of the forums during my research, I found out how creative one can be with a simple starting point. I was hired primarily for my software knowledge and to be a dedicated person to develop and analyze the online content of Mp3Car. I spend most of my days working in front of 3 monitors with headphones on and editing HTML, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, and vBulletin code. Much of the smaller and larger changes in online content in the past few months have been my work, such as this blog.
After starting working for Mp3Car, I have since begun work on my own car computer and am hoping to get it installed by the end of the summer. It will pretty much be an AOpen miniDuo 945-X, 512mb of ram, 80gb hard drive, a 7" non-touchscreen monitor, and a customized XP installation. I know that nearly everyone on the forums will ask "Why go with a non-touchscreen?" I have two reasons for this 1) I am cheap and the more money I invest now in a car with nearly 150,000 miles, the worse I will feel when it dies and 2) I like an extra challenge. ->->
We expect to see lots of Intel based car computers at CES this year. VIA always has embedded platforms which can be modified to for the car, but other than the embedded products it seems like they have disappeared from the car-computing world now that Infill has died. The Guru units and its close cousin the Azentek cpc will be in at least 6 cars this year. Intel's new series of Mini-itx based boards has been a huge hit for prototypers, telematics labs, and hackers. We even based our telematics lab bundle of this line a few months ago.
Designed with the supprot and feedback of our community, the fusion brain guys have done it again – At midnight EST today they released version 4 of their fusion brain control center.
Goce, Heather and I (Robert Wray) are heading to SEMA this week. Help us!
Why is this the ultimate bench test? I got to sit outside with 70 degree fall weather in the Boston Commons – On a bench. Ahhhh.
Point Festival which happens to be steps from Michael Phelp’s new house.
SEMA 2008 is just around the corner. If you have a few seconds, give us your opinion on the show.
