Thread: nLite XP, CF card, VIA mobo, Bumbed out

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.