Pinyix

I'm working on putting a carputer in my car and I had been planning to simply put Microsoft's Streets and Trips on it. Someone directed me to mp3car.com though where I found carputers for better prices and this Streedeck software. It seems to have desirable features over stand alone navigation software, like playing music for you, that I presume it mutes or pauses the music you play when giving you directions. I however have set up the monitor in my car already and it is NOT a touch screen. I plan on getting a presentation oriented mouse with an ultra mini keyboard instead. Not what I'd prefer, but I found a way to make this all look OEM in my car and touch screens simply will not fit. Basically I will be using this carputer for music and navigation. Based on those two things working together, how would you rate Streetdeck compared to software like streets and trips? Thank you very much.

For reference:
Presentation Mouse: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16826135002
Mini Keyboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16823169003

strohj

what screen did you mount in your car?... they make touch screens is MANY sizes... so I find it hard to believe that you made a screen fit... but you cant make a touchscreen fit?

BTW..touch screens only have a touch sensitive overlay on the screen itself...

anyways.. streetdeck does pause the music when speaking out the directions..

you cannot compare streets and trips to streetdeck.. the one is only a navigation software where as the other is a fully built software for everything you would need entertainment/navigation wise in a car environment.. its also got nice and big so you can read it and see what is on the screen as opposed to streets and trips that look fine on your laptop's 15" screen.. but you cant see anything on a 7" screen in your car.

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Pinyix

Thank you for your help. Here is a picture of the screen in its housing. Its a 6.5" Fahrenheit screen. As you can see, lacking any buttons actually on the unit, its almost as large as it possibly can be.

Its 6.25"x3.75". I've not found anything that can fit within that small space yet.

tmproff

Well, now that Streetdeck can be purchased without the navigation software for a lower price, I think it's a no brainer to get it! It's a really excellent "out of the box" product with dedicated developers improving it on an ongoing basis. It is unfortunate that you do not have a touchscreen, but I'd recommend THIS for navigation.

The gesture technology (being able to actually draw letters and symbols on the touchscreen) is one of the nicest features of Streetdeck, and can only be used with a touchscreen.

Even so, I really enjoy Streetdeck, and there is very little setup necessary.

strohj

you can fit a 7" in there if you take it out of the housing and mod your bezel a little bit... the height difference between a 6.5" and 7" is almost negligent...

or you can add a "aftermarket" touch screen overlay to your screen

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2k1Toaster

For another opinion it is not a "no brainer" to get it in my opinion. I work hard for my money, and I would rather spend 1 hour to set something up for free, then to spend $200 for a pop it in and work.

Streetdeck is a very nice and clean software solution. However, there are many pieces of software that integrate nicely on touchscreens and they are called frontends. Look in the software, then frontends subforums and you will find a nice list of most of them.

I use RoadRunner. Now that it has an installshield it is extremely easy to configure to get working. Takes about 1hr for somebody who is new to the program to configure the settings appropriately for their computer. The integrated configurer is called "RRConfig", and it is basically a bunch of checkboxes and dropdown menus to select options.

I reccommend you read up on it and save yourself $150. $200 saved for using free and better software, and $50 spent on a navigation program like S&T.


I find this hillarious because Streetdeck did not do this first. RoadRunner (ahem, free) did and still does use this.

As for an opinion on streets and trips, I like it. I use it on my 15" laptop display, and I use it in my car on my 7" display. Both run at 1024x768.

If you use roadRunner, then you can choose between various skins and some of them incorporate S&T (Streets and Trips). I use the Brushed Metal skin (BMV2) which is standard with any RR (RoadRunner) install. Then I can point you towards the thread in these forums with a skin for S&T that makes big buttons and easy routing.

Onky thing is you have to push the "Start GPS tracking" the first time you open it. Takes a second out of your life, big whoop.

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strohj

this is not a thread about who did what first... nor did the OP ask our opinion on different frontends... you are correct there are many other alternatives out there...

how do you read the menu options etc on your 7" screen for streets and trips... and press the buttons using your touch screen...?

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2k1Toaster

THe guy said gesturing technology as if it were new and unique. If that is a selling point, he should be well aware that other frontends do this too.

In my opinion he did ask for opinions on frontends, because the title of the thread is "How would you rate Streetdeck". from the tone of things, he thought that Streetdeck was comparable to Streets and Trips which it is not. As the first post said, S&T is navigation, Streetdeck is a frontend with navigation. Apples and Oranges.

Usually with questions like these people are unaware that other options free or otherwise exist because they are not so heavily promoted.

And as long as the screen is calibrated right (I did 25pt calibration once and that was it) then where you poke is where the touch goes. So whne I load my GPS skin for BMV2, there is a button that looks like a triangle (big RR button) and I push it. The GPS pane pops up with the compass and all that good stuff. THen you poke at the "Start GPS tracking" and away it goes in about a second with my location centered.

There is an AutoIt script floating around too that disables the stupid "Dont type and drive" message that pops up when you click "Provide voice guidance" and it works great. Actually I think there are 2 versions now...

Great solution for me. You should check out the screenshots too just to see what I am talking about. Really nice. There is a button to bring up the OSK too. No guessing destinations though. Not like you type "M" and Main Street and Mountain Road come up and then "A" and only Main Street like other programs though. That and not reading the names of streets are the only downfalls in my eyes. It says turn left in xx miles, but not turn left on Blah blah street in xx miles.

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RedGTiVR6

please do not turn this thread into a this is better than that thread. This is not a place for that kind of discussion. If you wanted to start that kind of discussion, do so in another thread where it's been asked.

One question I have for the OP is...is that screen a VGA screen? Doesn't appear to be by the way you've described it. That's going to be a rather large problem if you're planning on using a PC in the car.

StreetDeck cannot be used with Streets & Trips. If you purchase the lite version and wish to use navigation, you need Map Point 2004 or 2006 to use the navigation features.

When looking at which front end to use, you need to do more than just compare feature lists. You need to look at the useability of the software while in the car.

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2k1Toaster

Didn't mean too. From the way he wrote the post, it seemed to me as if he magically appeared at mp3car, and went to the store to check things out. He saw streetdeck, and clicked the link to the streetdeck forums to ask a question oblivious to the fact that there are other pieces of software out that that do the same thing.

I think he should buy nothing yet, and read a bit from that nice "New to CarPC, read this" sticky you made.

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Pinyix

Ok. There is a lot of information to decipher here. I took a quick look at road runner. It doesn't work well... easily. I'm sure with a lot of figuring out it could, but in all honesty, I'd rather spend $200 on something that works right out of the box than spend one or two hours getting things to work with the software. It will take me many MANY hours to get this carputer setup correctly and neatly in my car as it is. I've built many computers from scratch myself but dealing with software drives me up the wall.

The screen does not have a VGA input, it has an S-Video input. I figured after I get windows installed in the house, I could set up an adapter in the car no problem.

I didn't think about Streets and Trips on such a small monitor with the fonts, but that is an excellent reason to avoid it for my application. Its tips like this that I joined for.

RedGTiVR6

I'm not aware of any S-video to VGA adapter that will allow you to up convert and still get the resolution you need. Maybe I'm just missing it.

StreetDeck has taken the Map Point interface and made it more readily useable in the car.

I'd recomend trying out the demo to see if you like it. http://www.streetdeck.com/

If you have any problems with the demo, please feel free to contact me via PM.

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2k1Toaster

If that is what you want, good for you. I am sure you will like StreetDeck. It is very polished and works well no fuss.

THe screen is going to be a problem when you are exploring windows. While using the frontend, not so much because the fonts are bigger and everything, but in windows it is going to be fuzzy wuzzy.

And the higher price streetdeck comes with navigation so don't get the cheap one if you want all in one. I believe you cannot upgrade later to the navigation version later. I could bewrong about that though.

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Pinyix

Alright. I took my laptop out to the car and plugged in the 6.5" as a secondary monitor. I fiddled with it and made windows font extra large and made the resolution 800x600. With font this big, the screen is just barely readable. Its functional, but inconvenient. I downloaded road runner to the laptop and put it on the secondary display for reference. Everything is much easier to read and is much more functional. I can see why a monitor with a VGA input is prefered and perhaps in the future I will find one that fits nicely, but for now, I think this monitor will do.

I'll probably order a carPC off of mp3car.com within the next few weeks. I'll linger around here for a while reading up. That sticky in the newbie section is very helpful, but I need to set aside a lot of time to get everything out of it I can. I'll probably have more questions in the near future, but I'll see what the search function has to offer first. Thank you very much.

god_of_cpu

Oh c'mon dude. I probably shouldn't be adding fuel to the fire, but if there is one contribution above all else that StreetDeck has made it was bringing in car gestural technology to the main stream. We didn't invent gesture recognition technology nor were we the first to use it in the car, but at a minimum we were the first to integrate tightly into a UI that made it accesible to anyone with a touchscreen. The whole UI was originally designed around the concept. The lack of buttons and the need for 3D accelerated technology to render fading and color changing gestures were all driven by the original in vehicle HCI research (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/ava...182003-164858/) started over 6 years ago that is at the very foundation of StreetDeck. StreetDeck was finally released to the general public in January of 2006 and a month after seeing it in action, some of the technology in StreetDeck was copied in RoadRunner http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=70138

RoadRunner is a fantastic open source project that is one of the many driving forces that causes us to constantly make StreetDeck better, my only problem with it is that a few people seem to use it as a reason to hate StreetDeck for charging money for the software we write. Our goal with StreetDeck is to bring open architecture car computers to the masses and our biggest competition is traditional embedded infotainment devices. The more interest car computers of any kind get, the better it is for us, even if that interest does not originate from our software it still helps us with our ultimate goal at which time we just have to make sure we have the best product out there. The other free projects on the mp3car forums have alot of nice features and I encourage everyone on the forums to go out and try all the other competing software and tell us what's wrong with StreetDeck.

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