The Mp3Car Blog

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.

Everyday, members of Mp3Car’s forum seem to come up with some amazing solutions to everyday problems encountered in the car computing world. Seeing that we have a pretty steady blog going on, I figured that it is about time to highlight some of these solutions a little more publicly. This gives opportunity for outsiders to see what we are all about here and give due recognition to those who demonstrate their skills to turn something ordinary into something extraordinary. In turn I hope this inspires yourself and others to innovate your own solutions to whatever troubles come your way.

Forum member AvWuff has come up with an interesting solution to adding phone support to a CarPC . Handsfree bluetooth is a touchy subject when it comes to car computers. There are so many complications. Software support only seems to work half the time (if at all). Limiting factors include: Phone manufacturer, Bluetooth stack, Bluetooth hardware, Microphone, Sound card, echo cancellation, frontend integration… the list really could go on for a while. Meanwhile AvWuff, dissatisfied with software based solution, went a slightly different route.

Using a Parrot Ck3000 evolution, an Adruino board and some other odds and ends, Av hacked together a new system to interface with his custom home-brew software. He took apart the Parrot device and soldered some wires on for relay control. Using the Parrot mute box, he used the speaker outputs to connect to the Adruino board to determine the state of the bluetooth and trigger commands on the computer. Though not as intuitive as the software, this rendition works. Read on to see the pros and cons.

To get the full explanation, read up on it here . Or check out his project page. If you're interested in this, I highly recommend you drop by Av's website to see some other stuff he has worked on. www.avbrand.com

Thanks Av for contribution!

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Over the weekend, Ecog worked on updating the Mp3Car Forum and made an addition.

Social Bookmarking is now possible - see the screen shot. For any thread, you can choose to Digg it, add it to your del.icio.us account, bookmark it in Technorati, Furl it, share it on Facebook or add a Yahoo bookmark. We expect that this change will help forum members track information on car computing, do research, and get more people contributing to the Mp3Car Forum.

And, as a side note, CarPC Specs has been updated, and edits to your CarPC Specs are now simple to make.

Stay tuned to this Mp3Car Forum News tag for more updates and additions over time. And give us feedback on this new feature in the Mp3Car Blog Talk section of the Forums. 

After a summer learning about Mp3Car and the Mp3Car forum community, I've finally finished up my largest project to give back in some fashion. My project is a method for easier searching of the Mp3Car meets. Here is a quick picture of it:

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Today there will be a few updates made to the Forums to improve usability. Hopefully it will help solve the scattered errors that people were having in replying to threads and other parts.  Please pardon the downtime, as I am working on it as quickly as possible.

-Nick