ok, I've been crazy busy lately, but here is my review of the fusion brain:
when I first saw the concept of this project I thought it was pretty cool, I mean it seemed very versitile & I had a few things that I wanted to try to computer control, I thank both tim & nick for allowing me to be a beta tester for this product.
one of the apealing things of the fusion brain was the fact that the control software was skinable & was designed to be easy to embead in any front end, this was good. I had envisioned setting up the brain to control the remote starting of my car as a pc controlled device, & being able to control windows opening & closing, sliding door opening & closing & a few other misc controls, the fusion brain performed as promised, & I was very pleased to see no eronious or spuratic outputs, weather the computer was on or off or inbetween, through repeated power ups & downs, the brain never sent any commands by accident, which was one of my first tests.
there was a small issue of a voltage regulator that was spec'd a bit low, but that's what beta testing is for, & the issue is being resolved on the production of these units, other than that & the beta boards having an error mix of red & green leds, electrically everything was fine, the board worked as it should & I was happy with the hardware.
now the software on this fusion brain is where it get's interesting, I mean the software was cool,yeah skinable, but pretty static & not highly customisable, but I had envisioned being able to skin this in a way that was very dynamic
I wanted to be able to display an image of my vehicle, & have it show the status of each of the items it had control over, similar to the display console of the new S-class benz. To my surprise, amazement & delight, nick also saw the benifit of this dynamic approach to skinning & software interface, & actually rewrote the entire interface making the whole program simply amazing, theres support for animated gifs, he even added the abilty to integrate gauges & indicators by using many different images that you put in file, it changes images based on values from another port, no flash necissary, it may seem intimidating, but if you can maniulate images & follow simple examples you can bud a skin for this.
you can build a page & have controls & readouts any way you'd like to display it, you can put a link to another page that you can also build as a sub menu/display, this is as versitile & customisable as it gets short of writing your own program!! the software for this fusion brain allows you to build your own graphic interface with no programming knowledge required! the latest addition now is voice control... if they had these fusion brains back when micheal was driving kit they wouldn't have had to make that whole thing fake
It's hard to really explain how thrilled I am with the whole concept of this fusion brain, suffice to say when pre orders were announced I ordered a few more of these, the uses of this are as wild as your imagination, I want to use these at home, in the car, I guess by now you can guess that I'm going to give this a rock solid 5 stars.... I'd recommend this to anyone who has a carpc or any pc that wants to control external devices & read external sensors, & then design there own skin to really have there own totally custom interface.... It don't get better than this & to me, there just is no competition
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