nLite XP, CF card, VIA mobo, Bumbed out

IntellaWorks · 03-04-2005, 07:55 PM

Hey yall, I'm kinda bumbed out here. I spent about 80 hours getting the correct version of a nLite'd XP install to work with all my hardware settings and applications on a CF card so that my machine wouldn't have trouble bootins at colder temps.

Problem is, the VIA Epia seems to have a "safe" temp mode on temps below 15 F degrees... Even though my CF card can boot at -15F the board it self wont boot until its temp is around 20 degrees. Granted my machine is basically solid as can be and I dont have to worry about bad sectors and it can boot in much colder temps than with a laptiop HDD I'd say that the problems I've had with geting everything on to a CF and the limited ability that I have with the OS on the CF card wasn't worth it..

Anyone else see this same problem ??

mpattonm · 03-05-2005, 09:52 AM

Well I am happy with what I did and I am glad I did go nLite way. So thats said. Otherwise, I am interested about what I see in your sig: OEM GPS and that crazy idea of rewriting your frontend in .NET. Why would you do so? BTW cold you tell us more of GPS and front end you are using?

IntellaWorks · 03-06-2005, 08:35 AM

Well, the front end I developed a while back was written in VB6 and was truely a wonderful app. E-mail, GPS, Audio, Video and weather it also had voice reco for the medi application.

I discovered the power of .net when developing an application for work and decided to re-write my existing front end to not only do the same stuff but to also act as almost like an operating system instead of just an application. Plus making a few enhance ments to the way the application ran since I was re-working it from the ground up it was easy to impliment the changes.

As far as the GPS is concerned, I'm using an internal GPS mod. Garmin 15L that is super small and super accurate. Check out the thread "OEM GPS modules" in the Hardware forum.

mpattonm · 03-06-2005, 09:32 AM

I see... Are you planning go out with your frontend eventually?

Bugbyte · 03-06-2005, 10:32 AM

I don't see the temps you see in NH but during our cold snap we in the high single digits and I didn't have a problem with the mobo - it was the laptop HD that was the problem. It did reboot after 3-4 minutes, though.

The Via came on right away and it didn't appear to have a temp problem.

IntellaWorks · 03-06-2005, 11:33 AM

I'm not sure if I'm going to release the front end or not, I just dont know if I can truely support it the way that these other front ends are supported. I will hoever release components of it such as the weather component and the email component... things that currently dont exist in the other front ends.

IntellaWorks · 03-06-2005, 11:42 AM

The temp rating of the mobo is 0C which is 32 degrees farenheight and after a night of steady cold temps around 0-10F the system just wont post.. I think there is a temp setting at board level that doesnt allow it to continue to post when its that cold.. because once its been in the car for a few minutes of much warmer temps I can hit the reset switch and it will come right up.

IntellaWorks · 03-06-2005, 01:01 PM

SC of the new front end. I wanted to use a "panel" system for displaying different modes. This is an image of the CD player playing a CD.. of course its still in the works as you can see the VB standard buttons on the right hand side are dumby controls for the audio buttons.

I wanted a nice way to easily change modes w/o going back to a menu or having a menu popup. So I have all the modes email, gps , video and settings/weather all on the buttom panel (main controls) That way its one click instead of two. With my previous front end and other front ends that I see out there its typically 2 clicks to change a mode, more clikcs mean more time your eyes are off the road.

The other significant change I made was subtle but really helped a bunch is creating one parent window and every panel is a child within the parent. To the prorgammers who read this its a MDI interface which I didn't have before.. don't know why I didnt do this before but its there now.

Other things that I'm seperating is Video / Audio I created a media class that can create two sub classes (audio or video) these classes take care of the media internally as well as decide where the media is comming from (CD, HDD or DVD) This system went pretty smooth for me once I got the ground work of the code laid down.

Other things that are of noteable mention is a custom text box control (that if anyone wants I'd be glad to send to impliment in thier front ends) Basically when its clicked on brings up the OSK.

mpattonm · 03-07-2005, 04:47 AM

Cool.. but I still dont get it about that .NET conversion. Do you want to have your frontend laaazzzyyy like hell (especially on Epia?!?)or you just cant live without 40 MBs library on your system that should supposedly be as much embedded as possible?

Jackboot · 03-07-2005, 06:28 PM

Back on topic!!!

Is anyone else having problems with a VIA motherboard not booting below 0 degrees celcius? I've done a CF install for that SOLE PURPOSE (booting in the cold) and this will lick bollocks if the mobo is the limiting factor. I haven't installed my setup in the car yet so I can't tell if I will have problems booting in -15 or colder weather...

mpattonm · 03-07-2005, 06:34 PM

I am testing my mockup in these days, its about minus 10 here.

knubile · 03-08-2005, 09:31 AM

I didn't know the EPIAs had a temp saftey feature. Mine will boot up no matter how cold it is. It's get's to -30C regularly here in Ottawa, Canada.
The problem I encounter is after the post. At the point where the windows logo appears, it reboots. Then boots back to the same point, then reboots again.
It will keep doing this until it is warm enough, the it continues on to Windows.
I have yet to figure out which part of my system is the culprit.

I have a 1G Sandisk Extreme. I know it's not rated at that temp, but it passes post and starts loading windows. That means its reading from the CF card. The ram must be getting used at that point. So what's left?

What does your system do exactly?

mpattonm · 03-08-2005, 10:05 AM

Possibly PSU could be weakest point.

IntellaWorks · 03-08-2005, 07:26 PM

When testing its gotta sit there all night in the cold cant just be a few hours.

as far as changing over to .Net, I like the functionality it gives. As far as programming I needed to learn it for my job and I fig'd what better way to get a good hands on and change my existing front end to .net, that way I can learn the language and acomplish my car stuff at the same time :-)

Dexter · 03-08-2005, 08:15 PM

yeah, .net is kinda slowish but it makes programming stuff alot easier and the functionality is pretty cool, so i can understand why someone would want to switch to .net