Thread: 2008 Impala SS - The Connected Car

Originally Posted by HiJackZX1

This sounds pretty cool. Now size wise, how big is it? If it is very small it would make cool personal units for each seat. Maybe fully built into it.

I just finished one of my rear systems and the thing that is killing me is that it takes up space I do not want to loose. I think at this point, everyone is looking for a small form factor.

well, the bybyte is a double-din system. The igep is small enough however that you could hide a lot of them all over the car and power them off the same dcdc-usb.

Originally Posted by tripzero

well, the bybyte is a double-din system. The igep is small enough however that you could hide a lot of them all over the car and power them off the same dcdc-usb.

But its basically the screen that forces you to go double-din?

Originally Posted by HiJackZX1

But its basically the screen that forces you to go double-din?

Exactly. Check out this page: http://www.igep-platform.com/index.p...5%3Cbr%20/%3E/

Particularly this image:


It's basically packing more features into the same size package as a sheeva plug.

Has any more progress been made using the IGEP board, as this looks perfict for what I want to do I am curious about how its working.

Originally Posted by DocLove

Has any more progress been made using the IGEP board, as this looks perfict for what I want to do I am curious about how its working.

Igep has been working very well. I had it running ubuntu 9.04 in the car for a while. However, due to some issues with the dcdc-usb driver, I yanked it out and have been trying to get meego running on it. So far my testing with meego and the dcdc-usb driver has been positive.

Another major issue I've run into is the touchscreen. Apparently there is a major regression for egalax based touchscreens in the Linux kernel and I haven't found a solution yet.

In other news, the new igepv2 has come out with a 1GHz processor. The expansion board will be out later this month and I'm probably going to get both of them for my other project.

UPDATE:

I've been experimenting for several months now. The main issue I've been having is the fact that egalax-based touchscreens (most of the ones we use for our carpcs) are b0rked in Linux and have been for a while except for maybe the proprietary drivers. However, if you want to use something like the igepv2, you aren't able to use even the proprietary ones. So in order to just have something, I've been using my exopc tablet for testing.

The main issue I've run into is power. I've reconfigured the setup with two dcdc-usb power supplies. One pushing out 19V for the exopc and one pumping out 5V for the USB hub. As you may recall, I have a 10W solar panel hooked up to a secondary battery. This, however, isn't producing enough electricity to keep the battery charged at full even when the exopc is off. But to prove that I wasn't generating enough power, I had to get some current readings.

Solar Controller: 0.01A - 0.15A (rainy vs. sunny) [1]
USB hub: 0.06A - 0.09A
psu1 (19V): 0.08A
psu1 (5V): 0.05A [2]
total system draw: 0.15A [3]
total peak system current with pc on: 3.4A [4]
pc draw: 0.9A - 1.5A [5]
pc draw screen off: 0.8A - 1.03A

[1] - The battery was nearly full (12.49V) when reading in the sun. This means the charge controller may have been throttling the current.
[2] - 0.05A may mean the USB hub drew less power after firing up for a while. Hooked up to the hub was one of the dcdc-usb, a usb-gps adapter, and a bluetooth adapter.
[3] - without PC connected/started
[4] - ExoPC was booting and charging
[5] - ExoPC was charging it's own internal battery and during this test, it never fully charged. This means the exopc was drawing more power than it would normally with a full battery.

Here's the new setup:

Haven't been keeping up on mp3car much lately, but I've been silently hacking on trying to come up with the absolute lowest power consumption possible.
I've moved on to using microcontrollers for the always-on tasks (i'll post a worklog soon)

It's not clear if you're still fighting to get the lowest power possible, but I can offer a couple of potential pointers:

If you're not already, you can supposedly save a ton of power on the igepv2 by installing a "tickless kernel" which will let you take advantage of ARM in the 0mhz state. I never actually did this, but
I've been using a 30 watt solar panel, and it is just nowhere near powerful enough to keep a FitPC2 (my quick and dirty semi-low-power car pc) running (Atom @ 5-8 watts)

The dcdc-usb claims to have >90% efficiency when regulating from 16volts to 12 volts at 2 amps. But I'm suspicious as to why the manual doesn't state any other voltages/amperages. You may want to measure how much power it's burning itself.

For the USB hub and the igepv2 which run on 5 volts, the most efficient and easily accessible power supply I can find is this: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10104
It's Tiny, $29.95 8v-42v input, 5v/3.3v output, 85-90% efficiency, but you lose all the fancy features of the dcdc-usb, not sure how much they matter to you though.

Hope you can find any of this useful.

So to handle the power issues, something needs to change. I'm probably eventually going to replace the exopc. It draws too much power. But even without the pc hooked up, the powersupply and the hub draws more than I put in. My 10W solar panel just isn't enough in this rainy, Oregon weather. So... I did what any engineer would do: bought more bigger stuff!

Attachment 65511

This solar panel is 30W while still being small enough to fit in the space in my back window. It has an aluminum frame that looks rather ridiculous in the window, so it's time to paint:



This is the paint primer pic.



However, after applying the black topcoat, i noticed this bubble-formation. The following pic is another bubble formation that peals off rather easily:



This primer/paint combination did that same thing on my plastic nerf gun. Bad primer?