Thread: The Connected Car 2.0 - I'm back at it.

So,

What's is so wrong with navit? I have it running in my vehicle (although I haven't tried the navigation part yet :} ) and I have read a number of reports of people using it on mobile devices.

Originally Posted by PaulF

I haven't figured the GPS bit out yet. I may try using Garmin maps with Navit. I think this is more of a problem with linux in general, not just ARM. If you're aware of a good i386 nav program for linux, do tell. There is always QEMU's single process emulation.

The problem using Garmin maps with NavIt is that they currently don't support navigation with those maps which is a rather big restriction. I'm not aware of any good GPS applications for Linux actually. I am aware that it's possible to run iGuidance or the recently retired Garmin Mobile PC using Wine though.

Thus I am planning to rebuild the latest version of QEMU in the near future and see if I can run Garmin Mobile PC using Wine in an emulated X86 environment. I am prepared for horrible performance but it could surprise me.

So,

I did so basic navigation with Navit -- which seemed to work (although I didn't have audio on) fine. So again, could someone mention what's wrong with navit -- maybe we could have those issues thrown at the maintainers...

Originally Posted by nasa

So,

I did so basic navigation with Navit -- which seemed to work (although I didn't have audio on) fine. So again, could someone mention what's wrong with navit -- maybe we could have those issues thrown at the maintainers...

So this issue could be remedied though, but people used to talk about it taking them down impossible routes before like requiring them to turn off of an overpass directly onto a highway with no on-ramp to be found or turning onto one-ways, etc.

Since I'm running out of time before school starts (~1 week) and I don't have anywhere I can really work on the car in Boston, I need to mostly finish this project this week!

Pandaboard Issues
I need to write too much software to make the Pandaboard useful and it suffers from random instability. Also a huge issue is there's nearly no way to get flash on the thing. Without a professional dev team, it will be difficult to make the thing do everything I expect. I'm still going to keep working towards the Pandaboard, but it's not ready for the car.

FitPC
As a replacement, I bought a fitPC2 (http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/). I have an SSD in it and Win7/Centrafuse (running smoothly) right now and it's using only 8 watts measured by a kill-a-watt on the mains side of its power supply so that includes PSU inefficiency! This power consumption is low enough to be always-on. Though this sadly means I'll be staying windows-based.

New Power Woes
Always-on is now an issue again. I have nowhere to charge my car in Boston, I won't use it everyday, and when I do it likely won't be a far enough distance to charge it. My solution will be a 30 watt solar panel mounted on the roof: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003DVY27U
The solar panel should hopefully be enough to keep the FitPc happy during the day while slowly recharging the battery. So hopefully the net-effect is that I can get a few weeks of leaving the computer on without worrying. I will have the Fusion Brain monitoring the voltage and charge amperage though just in case.

So I got the solar panel in the mail this morning and since I've never played with solar panels before I took out my multimeters to see what I could expect. The result was pretty awesome.

So the test setup was this:

Thanks to Irene, there's no sun here in Southeastern MA so I took out my 250 watt work light and shined it on the panel.

The panel is then attached to this 10amp HQRP charge controller:


I have my compact multimeter monitoring voltage:


And my big multimeter monitoring amperage:


And I'm using my old tank circuit battery to test this (wall mart lawn mower battery):



So the multimeters are reading 11.98 volts and 9.02 amps. Detaching the battery, the battery reads 11.26 volts, so this is definitely charging. Awesome. Though, surprisingly high output for a 30 watt panel 100+ watts!? I'm going to attribute this to it being so close to the work light. I'm going to try moving the test outside while it's still not raining and see what kind of charge rate I can get.