Fiberoptic

The PND (Personal Navigation Device) and Car computer are Dead (pretty soon they will be). Get the details on how we made this movie and help us kill them here.

Things used in making this movie:
Apple iPhone Video Output Cable
Iphone hacking tools
ScreenSplitr iPhone App
XGPS Iphone App
Earthscape iPhone App


http://vimeo.com/3138900
http://vimeo.com/3139145

MP3Car.com

 

kingjamez

Looking forward to the video. ScreenSplitr is awesome! I hadn't seen that before.

-Jim

Fiberoptic

Here are some high res screen shots

Attached Images

  

kingjamez

Great videos. Now you've got me reconsidering installing my Aspire One into my car. Looks like I can get a cheap 7" double din LCD radio and have the IPhone do the heavy lifting. Thanks!

-Jim

Fiberoptic

The apps are not perfect yet, but i think 6-9 months of heavy hacking will make this a usable solution. in the mean time there will still be a lot of people that want car computers until the mobile phone apps mature.

Full maturity of these mobile phone apps and seamless hardware integration will take 12-24 months.

skusa93

If your going to make a claim that you have a product that will kill the entire CarPC community, you might want to buy a dock for you iPhone.

Between the cable hanging off the dash, the air conditioning vent mount, and the head unit looking like it was installed by a 12 year old, your claim of killing the CarPC is far from justified.

Sorry to be an ***, but such an unjustifiable claim seems pretty ridiculous to me.

Bugbyte

Every single PND I see has wires looped over the rear view mirror and a suction cup holder on the windshield and looks like it was installed by 12 year olds.

If you look past the wires of a proof of concept install and check the potential, you'll see this is a Car PC killer.

It has:
1. Music
2. Video
3. GPS
4. Phone
5. Internet
6. Email
7. OBDII

And oh yeah...it's cheaper than a car PC.

This is the bleeding edge stuff, so of course there's stuff you can't do right now, just like you couldn't do with a Car PC not too long ago. But ninety percent of the basic functionality of the Car PC comes in this package. What's missing?

1. Touchscreen control. A way to control the software from the screen is required. While the setup in the video is a relatively straightforward display of the iPhone on your screen, what we need is a way to control the phone from the touchscreen. The software on the iPhone that relays the picture to the screen already has a built in mode that allows you to display the picture in a browser and control the iPhone from the browser. Perhaps there's a way to do the same with a hardware gizomo. Any engineers got any ideas on that?

2. Server-based front end that renders the phone hardware almost irrelevant. Sure, this is cool and all but it requires an iPhone. Surely someone will come up with a front end app that works for the car on the iPhone but wouldn't it be better to leverage the phone's ability to access the net and build a server based front end? Then any phone with a decent browser could play. In fact, the phone itself would become relatively unimportant as it would simply relay the commands to and from the server, perhaps streaming the music from your home PC or maybe downloading it.

Once those two issues are solved -and this is just the community to solve them by the way, the car PC will die. Slowly, for sure. For a long time, it will provide a better platform for storage and performance and for those who have specific customization requirements.

But it's dead already.

__________________
Want to:
-Find out about the iBug?
-Stop being a newbie? Take a look at the FAQ Emporium?
-Find out about carPC's in just 5 minutes? View the Car PC 101 video
-Help me kill my car PC
-Watch live video streams from my mobile PC? Check it out here.
-Where is the iBug?

pcpete

I don't get it? You're an mp3car staff and yet you seem to be encouraging the death of the carpc? wouldn't that kill you're mp3car store too?

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Bugbyte

It's going to kill it whether they encourage it or not. The original car PCs on this forum were simply mp3 player installs. I'm sure the community will evolve to include this new technology.

__________________
Want to:
-Find out about the iBug?
-Stop being a newbie? Take a look at the FAQ Emporium?
-Find out about carPC's in just 5 minutes? View the Car PC 101 video
-Help me kill my car PC
-Watch live video streams from my mobile PC? Check it out here.
-Where is the iBug?

skusa93

I really hate to just get into a yelling match about this, but didn't your mother ever tell you that if you friend jumps off a bridge not to follow him? Just because everyone else in the world is half-assing their installs, and promoting them as the next greatest thing, does not make it ok, it just means you need to be the one to break the mold and actually come up with something clean looking.

Now, lets pick this apart.
Do you have surround sound capability on you iPhone? Didn't think so.
Chalk one up for the CarPC.
Does your iPhone support playback of 1080i? Cause my CarPC will if I buy a Blu-Ray DVD Drive.
That's two.
GPS? Are you kidding me? Clearly you know absolutely nothing about the iPhone, which runs off of triangulation and not GPS.
Yet again, CarPC wins.
Phone? I have a cell phone with a $20 bluetooth adapter in my car. I'll throw you a bone and call this a tie.
Internet? How in the world do you call what the iPhone has as a browser internet, sure you can use it as a browser, but that's like saying I use my car for the radio, the internet has an infinite amount of possibilities, only one of which the iPhone takes advantage of. Pretty sure I'm stickin with the PC on this one too.
Why in the world is email important in your car? Are you really going to type a response on your iPhone mounted to the air conditioning vent while driving? If so I'm hoping you live nowhere near me.
Maybe I'm blind, but where does OBDII tie into any of this?

Not to mention all of this is contingent on me buying and owning an iPhone, something I've already done, and will absolutely never do again.

Do you not realize that your idea of having a complete frontend supported by any old phone is basically a PC using a phone simply as an I/O device for internet? How is this beneficial at all?

Just don't understand why your promoting this as such an innovative product, when it really isn't anything new at all, just an iPhone display being rendered on a head unit. Sure it's cool and all, but you can't really expect an iPhone to come even close to what a full PC can do, not even Apple would be stupid enough to make such a claim.

chronoguy

What is with the a/c dash mount? This set-up involves too much work - jailbreaking, etc..

I think my solution with the HTC Touch Pro is a whole lot easier. It is pretty much supported out of the box with only a $20 cable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjnABOFkJZw

I just have my phone inside the side console refrigerator (I never use the fridge). Everything is pretty much hidden from view. I can pull out a Logitech DiNovo Mini keyboard to interface with it. About 10X better than the iPhone.

The problem with the iPhone (I have a 3G model) is that it doesn't have a front end or one you can get from the app store. Playing video is a bit of a hassle. I have my iPhone in my car as well and you can't really play videos by playlists. If you have 50 music videos, you have to exit out of the current one to play the next one. I don't have this problem with the regular IPOD. I use a Ipod Classic 80 just to play videos in my car.

Also, the Iphone doesn't support third party HID devices. You can't use a bluetooth keyboard or touchscreen HID from the LCD.

Phones are getting there. I use my HTC Touch pretty much over the standard Nav I already have.

Don't discount PNDs. You can buy a Mio and hack it pretty much; install a new front end, add multiple GPS apps - Garmin XT, Tom Tom, IGuidance, IGo, Oncourse,etc... All you need is a SD card and the proper boot executable. if there was a PND with Video Out and GPS built in, I would totally do that.

kingjamez

Who needs 5.1 surround sound in a car? But ok, if you have a center channel speaker then yeah a CarPC wins.

Really think your eye's can see the difference in quality on a ~7 inch 840x480 screen from 2.5 to 3 feet away? You must have 20/10 vision and super upconverting eyes.

Are you kidding me? Clearly you know absolutely nothing about the iPhone which runs off of GPS.... yes GPS.

And your list of errors continues...you need to take a 2nd look at the iPhone 3G. It sounds to me like you had an original iPhone and you never Jailbroke it. A 3G Jailbroken iPhone has far more capabilities than the original.

-Jim

az1324

The iphone has a serial port and so someone needs to write a driver for a serial touchscreen interface and problem solved. Love the progress and can't wait until the day that my cell phone is my pc is my car pc is my gps is my credit card. F the cloud i want it all in my pocket.

kingjamez

When sweettooth gets up and operational, the iPhone will have full Bluetooth capabilities. Think of what that will do for the CarPC application. OBD II, wireless keyboard, mouse, touchscreens, etc...

-Jim

MeeM

It's a bold statement to make. If you watch the market carefully, you'll see that Pioneer, Sony, JVC, etc. are all making headunits with 7" touchscreen LCDs, USB ports, iPod control, DVD player (possibly Blu-Ray now), HD radio, and some even have hard drives built-in. These are simple car PCs in their own right. We're going to reach a point of convergence: what we car PC enthusiasts have been doing for years will eventually meet up with the new models from the likes of these electronics giants. At that point, most headunits will be car PCs without people realising it. As it stands, many car makers have the radio, a/c, OBD stats running on a common interface and sometimes one screen, so the convergence is inevitable. It's just a matter of time before we find all cars coming with 120GB hard drives, full internet capability, etc. and these will be available in new cars as well as aftermarket units.

Instead of encouraging you to use the phone as the car PC, the electronics giants would rather build a headunit with all the bells and whistles, and add a phone control module so that you can use your phone as the bridge to the internet cloud or whatever service your phone can offer that's not already in the headunit.

It's not dead. And if it is dying, it will take years upon years to fully extinguish, after which it will simply reincarnate itself as the standard system in your new car.

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