Thread: Sean's 2004 Subaru Impreza WRX Project

Ok, so It's been more like a week, I've been busy. Here are my preliminary plans

Phase 1: Install car computer to be used as a music player using my cellphone as an input method

Phase 2: Install touch screen to control car computer music player

Phase 3: Add functionallity such as gps, interface to my phone, dvd? etc.

Phase 4: Upgrade sound system

Phase 5: Install a head unit

I recently noticed that more and more cell phones these days are coming equipped with bluetooth. This got me thinking, "What more could I do with this other than those stupid head sets?" So I got the idea to control the music playing on a computer with the phone. I found this website that was very encouraging.

http://www.unixbeard.net/~richardc/cgi/blog.cgi/dea.pod

If you aren't interested in reading all that I'll sum it up. Sony Ericsson phones have specialized AT commands that you can send via bluetooth allowing you to add items to the Accessories Menu on the phone. AT commands are the commands that your computer uses to control modems. So if I were to add these menus I could click on them to control the music playing on my computer!

The website specifies use for the T68i model phone, which seems to be outdated. So I figured "Would Sony Ericsson really remove this functionality from their newer phones? I'll just go ahead and get the z520a" See it was relatively cheap because I just signed up with Cingular.

After the purchase I found this website...

http://developer.sonyericsson.com/si...isc/p_misc.jsp

Which contains a PDF that outlines all the AT commands available on all of their phones. The good news, using these AT commands I can add menu items to not only the Accessories Menu, but any menu on the phone! The bad news, it doesn't seam trivial to add sub menus. This would make it very difficult to manage the 5000 or so songs I have on my computer.

After hitting this brick wall I got to thinking. Hey...my phone has java, I wonder if I could run a java program that could control the music on my computer? This would be even better than the AT commands for a couple of reasons.

a) To run the AT commands it seems that the computer has to connect to the phone, this is slightly counter productive because I want the phone to control to the computer. With a java program it seems like it should be possible to initiate the program and have the phone connect to the computer. Thus making everything groovy

b) Using a program on the phone just seems more versatile doesn't it?

So I've downloaded the java development platform and am reading all kinds of documentation on working with Java ME (Micro Edition) for mobile devices.

A couple of websites that I've found useful in the java department...

http://www.developer.com/java/j2me/a...0934_1561591_1

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2005/02/09/j2me1.html

I plan to use Linux with this whole operation because I want to have some flexibility and I am not so sure I want to pay microsoft so that they can make me do everything their way. Besides, I currently have an old computer running as a music server in my living room that I'd also like to be able to control with my phone. I'm hoping that I can write a java program, or modify an existing one that would be a front end for the mpd (music player daemon) that I have running on that computer.

This looks promising

http://jamming.a0z.org/

And a little info on mpd

http://www.musicpd.org/

So turns out being grad school depletes you of time and money, but I've finally found a little bit of both to come back to the project. I've been looking at themes and none of them really suit my fancy. I don't want a bunch of buttons for things that I won't have in my carpc, I also want something a little more simple than what I've seen out there so here are a few screens of what I'm planning. I'm borrowing heavily from the acura itx skin, as well as the simplistique skin. I hope no one minds.

I use an open source vector drawing program called inkscape to do the black and white mock-ups. I make basic shapes such as circles and squares and combine them to make the various icons.

To make the stars on the Subaru logos I just used the bezier curves tool and basically traced over a logo that I found on the internet.

I have found that the best way to go about this method is to either make shapes that are filled with no outline, or have an outline and are not filled. It makes things easier to change later on. Each icon is drawn up in a separate file and then resized and added to menu drawing.

After a menu is made up in black and white, I basically use it as a stencil in Gimp which is an open source raster drawing program. Here is an example of what the above menus will look like when finished.

For the brushed metal look I do a gradient from aaaaaa grey to around 555555 grey. Then add rgb noise under the filters->noise menu at 20% on red, green, and blue. Next a motion blur (filters->blur->motion blur) is done with a length of 60 and an angle of 10.

At this point I select the regions in black and delete them from the brushed metal. I then add a layer underneath and select a blue gradient from the middle outwards. I don't have specific numbers on the blue that I used, I just selected a random light blue and dark blue. I then applied the same rgb noise/motion blur to this blue gradient. I then added a gradient flare on this layer in the center of the subaru logo. And reapplied the rgb noise/motion blur combination.

Once the colors are mapped out I select the regions that I just cut out of the brushed metal, invert the selection so that everything that is a brushed metal color on the top layer is selected. I then added drop shadow and bevel from the filters->lighting effects menu. This was done with settings of x=1 y=2 I believe. It is possible that those values are reversed (just affects which way the light looks like it is coming from). That makes the brushed metal appear to raise up. I next selected the WRX logo from my black and white stencil (which at this point is underneath both the blue and brushed metal layers) and apply the same drop shadow and bevel effect to it.

Feel free to leave suggestions, and I will hopefully be able to stay on top of this project now. I'm pretty excited that I may finally get this thing going.

And considerations for a night skin.

I ordered parts last week here's the list

Intel D201GLY Little Valley Mobo 1.3GHz Celeron Processor
512MB Kingston 667 DDR2 RAM
Lilliput 7" Touch Screen

And just today I ordered
Subaru Bolt-In Kit
Seagate Extreme Conditions 40GB 2.5" ATA Hard drive (operates at -25C)

As of now I've been installing the system.

Step 1: Running Windows XP Pro sp2 and installing on an old 3.5" hard drive I had laying around (Just to get everything working)

After installing the drivers for the touchscreen, graphics chip, and audio controller Almost everything was working well I'm still struggling a little bit with the 800x480 resolution. The D201GLY has native support for this, but for some reason when I first set it my lilliput would cut off 90 pixels from the top and bottom as if it were displaying 800x600. It was as if I were watching a movie in letterbox format.

Resetting the Lilliput solved this (kind of) after reseting it acts as if displaying 800x480. For example my Road Runner skin that is set to display at 800x480 does open in full screen. However when using this image

the lines are squeezed together a bit at regular intervals. Further more when I enter the menu on the Lilliput it says that it is displaying at 640x480

After reading a lot of posts on the whole 800x480 business, I guess I should just count my lucky stars that it is displaying 800x480 at all, and that circles look like circles.

I've made some significant progress on my skin, both music and gps are working great. Here are some screenshots