Thread: BMW IBus-Heads

For those with E46s (or those familiar with them), does it seem like there's only maybe 7 or 8 character spaces possible to display on our OBCs? If that's the case, then I'm not sure its worth displaying anything like song/artist names there. You won't be able to read it very well with so few characters displayed at once.

Originally Posted by Hark

For those with E46s (or those familiar with them), does it seem like there's only maybe 7 or 8 character spaces possible to display on our OBCs? If that's the case, then I'm not sure its worth displaying anything like song/artist names there. You won't be able to read it very well with so few characters displayed at once.

This is a pretty nice thing option though.. if not too distracting, and the speed is enough, perhaps the software could send out the text with some sort of scroll -- just a suggestion.

@Hark
I've added a send to mid option on the gui. would you mind giving it a test run when you get some time with the FF option set?

@guino

I'm pretty sure the speed is good enough (every 11ms) as long as ibuscomm contention is set correctly, this shouldn't be a problem. I'll do this so that it can scroll based on any given number of charachters, that should solve this once and for all.

@guino / darth
I have an issue regarding the road runner SDK and the way it's set up with this version of ibuscomm. When I have both of them runing, it seems there is some problem with application focussing. So if I try to run an external GPS, or enable visulisation in winamp, it ony appears brielfy. When I minimise road runner and try to use anything like notepad, focus is lost after half a second.
If I turn off either roadrunner or ibuscomm, the behaviour goes.

My VB skills are slowly getting there, so bear with me!

I've noticed there's a timer which sends a request to roadrunner using COMSend, and COMReceive then gets a message from roadrunner (presumabely it knows the sender based on their Hwnd id).

My guess is this happening when roadrunner is communicating with ibuscomm upon events.

is it possible to register as a listener with road runner, so that rather than requesting info via a timer, it would send out events? that way we can get one way communication going from road runner to ibuscomm. (steering wheel functions etc would of course still go the other way).

I'm not sure if doing it this way would solve this focus problem.

I'm not sure this is an issue with the SDK. I'm a VB newb, but it looks to me like COMSend shouldn't affect application focus when sending commands to RR. I'm sure Guino can confirm if this is the case. However, there are a couple of places in the Ibuscomm code that will force the application to the foreground, partly due to the nature of the original sendkey call. You might try changing the follow line in the ibuscomm .ini to false.

AppForceForeGroundOnEvent=true

Also in the ProcessIbusMsg sub, I pretty much just copied the keyboard event statements and changed the code to COMSend, but I neglected to remove the ForceForeground line. The bold line below I believe is unnecessary, but should only affect things when you are sending an RR command contained in an Ibus message template.

' Send RR Commands if have to
If IBusMsg.RRCommand > "" Then
If AppForceForegroundOnEvent Then ForceForegroundWindow (hWndTargetApp)
COMSend "RoadRunner", IBusMsg.RRCommand
If LogMode Then
ListLog.AddItem "RR Command was " & IBusMsg.RRCommand
End If
End If


I plan to work on scrolling the text at some point, but haven't had a chance yet. So if you get to it first, Sama, that would be great. I did make one change since the last version I posted. It's a crude handshake control based on the status of the DSR line. It will only work if your interface is capable of monitoring ibus status through hardware, though. I'll post it the next chance I get.

I have test your software in my e46. Here there are my findings:
1.- Send keys to RoadRunner do not work. I was not able to popup/down the volume, change songs, ...
Maybe you know that
2.- I did not get any message in mu Radio CD display. Is there where IBusComm sends the messages? I switch my source beetween radio, CD, aux and I do not get anything displayed. am I doing anything wrong?

What I see is that IBusComm reports send to mid messages and even it takes song names from roadrunner correctly.
Keep dong the great job.

@darth

I have teh appforce setting in the ini file set to false, and I'll have a look at the code segemnt sometime soon. thanks for pointing that out.

do me a favour... if you get started on the scroller first, just stick a post here, and I'll do the same so we dont' end up working reduntantly.

@aal2000

are you sure your ibus adaptor is communicating between ur pc and ibus? and that the comport in ibuscomm is set to the ibus adaptor's com port?

as a test, try ibus analyser and make sure you can see a "live" sequence of events.

Yes, I am sure beacuse I can see all the events. Even when I press any of my steering wheel buttons, I see the event in the IbusComm text box. I was using CDR last version of RR I-Bus and it worked perfect.
Let me do some more tests to find out if I have any hadware problem.
Thanks

Originally Posted by aal2000

Yes, I am sure beacuse I can see all the events. Even when I press any of my steering wheel buttons, I see the event in the IbusComm text box.

how curious. the mechanism between cdr's changes and darth's changes is different. the first uses ibus comm's ability to target rr and the second targets rr directly (allowing you to also set another applicatin using ibuscomm's traditional method. so either it sound like ibuscomm is not able to locate roadrunner, or I'm barking up the wrong tree

Originally Posted by aal2000

Yes, I am sure beacuse I can see all the events. Even when I press any of my steering wheel buttons, I see the event in the IbusComm text box. I was using CDR last version of RR I-Bus and it worked perfect.
Let me do some more tests to find out if I have any hadware problem.
Thanks

If CDR's version was working and the events are visible in ibuscomm, this one should work as well. If you can, post your ibuscomm .ini file and possibly a short log file capture - I would guess that there's a setting or two that is out of sorts.