Apr29

My car is now on the net

Categories: Uncategorized
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Today I received my usb evdo card from Millenicom. They are a reseller of Verizon mobile broadband. The reason I went with them is that there is no contract.

One reason for having this card is internet radio stations when I’m driving. Another is to be able to check e-mail or surf the web when I’m at a place where I don’t have internet access.

Apr27

Everything working now except nghost

Categories: carputer
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When I log in as root nghost functions okay execept it doesn’t display my music list.

When I log in as a user, nghost doesn’t seem to want to accept input. When I click on a menu item nghost doesn’t seem to do anything.

If I could get nghost working again I’d be super happy. I may have to recompile it or something. I’m not really sure whats up.

Apr22

Carpc touchscreen problems fixed!

Categories: carputer
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It is working flawlessly. The calibration stays even when I power off the unit and power it back on. I used this egalax page to get me an idea of what to do. I did as he did and copied the /usr/share/hal/fdi/50-eGalax.fdi file and put it in /etc/hal/fdi/policy.

I then looked at /etc/evtouch/config for the parameters of my calibration (I had previously successfully calibrated my touchscreen.) I used those values (well just the MINX,MINY,MAXX,MAXY) in the /etc/hal/fdi/policy/50-eGalax.fdi.

This was a tough task to accomplish and I thought I was going to have to settle on having to reboot when I lost power to the screen. I am glad I found that link. I hope others find it useful as well.

Apr18

Catastrophe!

Categories: carputer
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Today after the mp3car gathering I dropped by my brothers house to work with him on his arcade cabinet his making. Well, we were waiting for the glue to set up so I took him out to show him the carputer. When I booted up the os said it needed to be checked. Did I want to check it, and that it could be dangerous to check on a mounted system. I figured. What the heck. I’ve done it before. Well, this time was the time it was dangerous. When I rebooted Grub had a fit. The O/S was completely gone (I’m sure if I really wanted to I could have recovered from this.)

Since I wasn’t terribly happy with the ext3 filesystem I used this as an excuse to load the latest ubuntu on the drive with the jfs filesystem.

Everything went flawlessly. Now I just have to start rebuilding the system with the apps I want on it.

Apr14

Got the touchscreen working on the carputer

Categories: carputer
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I added a line like this to my touchscreen drivers section in xorg.conf

Option “CorePointer”

I’m so happy with this. The system is only inches away from being fully functional.

Apr13

A video I took of my carputer screen

Categories: carputer
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I don’t know how interesting it will be to people. But I think it looks pretty cool. I still have to clean up the install as you can see. But overall I think it looks okay.

carpc

Apr12

Today we got OBD-II working with nghost

Categories: carputer
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We (well, a guy named mal|lappy on #linuxice on freenode.net) got the obd-ii stuff working on my carputer
nghost_obd-ii_carputer working

We (well, a guy named mal|lappy on #linuxice on freenode.net) got the obd-ii stuff working on my carputer

Apr10

Starting from scratch

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Well, I decided to use a new kernel. So while all the software is still installed, I have no networking and I’m sure there are other kernel modules I’m missing that need to be recompiled as well.

Hopefully I’ll get the networking up tomorrow which will speed up the rest of the process.

Apr9

Made some good progress on the carputer today

Categories: carputer
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I got the music working. And I’m making progress with the gps and elmscaner. Instead of nghost reporting plugin not loaded I now get -1 for the data at the ncarinfo screen, and gps shows some bogus data as well.

It might have to do with the d-bus error messages that are spewing in the shell.

Also for some reason the touch screen isn’t responsive. But sometimes it works normally. I’m thinking it is because there is some process hogging resources and when it is done the touchscreen works fine. This is only a guess though.

Apr6

Played with the gui and udev today on the carputer

Categories: carputer
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I added some udev rules to have the gps and elmscan have a permanent device. I set them up as gps0 and elm0.

It turns out the chip in the elmscan is also used in some gps’s So I justed edited the line in my gps udev rule to make it be elm0. My system was creating a gps0 and gps1 previously.