Where does this wire go?

I was convinced by a co-worker while on a busness trip to purchase the Apple Magic Trackpad. I had the idea of using its multi-touch functionality for controlling my carputer with it. So far it is exceeding my expectations.

I’ve already got app switching working with just the swipe of my hand, and I have a 5 finger touch bring up the on screen keyboard. For now it is doing what I expected. The more I play with it, the more ideas I get on what I can do with it.

It was a little rough getting started as I needed a fairly recent kernel so I upgraded to Ubuntu Natty 11.04. This caused some issues as my preferred window manager is icewm and natty runs gnome bu default. I had an issue with Natty not saving my default session and that hung me up for a few hours. It turned out to be a permissioning issue on one of the files.

I was also experimenting with some other music players and decided there was still nothing out there that worked the way I wanted so I decided to keep my own. this led to another issue. The program I wrote tends to not pass through key presses so when I get to that app the key presses simulated by the magic pad just get absorbed and not sent to the window manager. This is a bug in my code, and I’m going to tackle it next.

After that bug is squashed I’m going to move on to controlling the audio volume using the rotate controls sent from the magic pad. I’m not sure what else I’m going to use it for, but as I play with integrating it into the system I have no doubt I will find more useful things for it to do. The Apple magic touchpad seems to have a lot of potential.

I found that once I installed SUNs java6 and ran
sudo update-alternatives –config java
it started working

Note that I’m using ubuntu and the instructions on speechlion say to run update-alternative. I don’t know if that was a typeo or not on their part.

So, with speechlion running I am one step closer to controling the system by speech. I had it working on the test bench but never in the car.

I want to make one more comment on CMU sphinx and java. Make sure you run the update-alternative(s) command because I found that even though I did an apt-get install in ubuntu that it wasn’t using the sun version until I did. I suppose if you never installed a different version of the java runtime it might not be a problem but better to make sure it is using the right one than to make an assumption.

I can’t tell you how hard it was to figure this out because no one bothered to document the issue with openjdk and cmu sphinx and the “Can’t open microphone null error”

After much looking I finally found this CAR BATTERY PROTECTOR 12V-12V / MAX. 10A

The battery protector prevents appliances from draining the battery of your car. The device continuously monitors the voltage and charge status of your car battery.

Specifications

input voltage: DC 12V
connected voltage: 12.5V ± 0.3V
cutoff voltage: 11.2V ± 0.3V
maximum operating current: 10A (protected by 10A fuse) (PSPC10BP)

car battery protector low voltage cut off

I want my carputer on as long as possible but the problem is that my power supply won’t cut power until the battery goes to 8 or 9 volts. Hopefully this little thing will prevent a dead battery.

I drove down to Baltimore for a day trip to go to ARK Fest and meet up with some online people I knew through mp3car.com. Seeing some cool setups and talking about car computing really energized me. I’ve been playing with a lot of stuff.

1) working on voice commands and stuff using simon again.

2) tweaked my traffic screen a little

3) worked on fixing my weather.

I think I made lots of progress in the last week or so. I haven’t tested some of the stuff I did this weekend yet but if it works like it is supposed to my car computer should be one step closer to being where I want it to be.

I’m still working at migrating all the data to the SSD I got. I expect it will be a week or so to get it up to par again.

I’m currently working on a small music player that I can use in the car. I want it to be fairly straight forward so I don’t have things like play lists and databases. It simply uses a starting directory and reads the subidrectories.

It is still in a very crude state and some variables like starting directory are hard coded. The code is very sloppy. If you want to play with it and submit changes let me know.

Requirements: python, pygame

mymusic

Linux can control the mouse and keyboard from the command line using a tool I found called xvkbd. There are many such tools for linux but this is the only one I found that can move the pointer.

The reason I need such a tool is that I plan to use voice control and use a script to navigate the screen.

Being able to use the mouse and make it click will allow me to kind of script actions and have non voice aware programs be controlled with voice.

xvkbd is in many distributions, however in ubuntu the mouse stuff seems broken. The revision is up to date, but I had to go get the source and compile it in order for the mouse to work.

I was hoping the M2-ATX would shut off the rail at 11.0V but appparantly it doesn’t. I’ll probably have to change the setting to some value with a hard off instead of using never.

In optimizing my bios, the key things I did was disable automatic drive detection. Also, any features that had options that included auto I made sure to select from the list instead of using the auto option.

It was a bit of a pain, but at least it isn’t snowing yet and the temperature was still above 60f. I would guess it took me about an hour or two. What this means is that now instead of having the 12v going to both the 12v and acc connectors on the m2atx the 12v has 12v and the acc is now connected to a proper 12v switched line for the car.

I have the m2-atx set to 3 hours before it powers off, and to never shut off the +5v. I’ll have to see if this is a good idea. I think now that the power supply will see no voltage on the acc line that it will automatically shut down when the voltage goes below 11v. I’m still trying to understand the logic of the m2-atx. I don’t know why they couldn’t just have an option to keep it powered all the time unless the voltage drops to low. I don’t get this whole time thing I could care less if it is only on for 15 minutes or 30 minutes after I just of the key. I would like it to stay on as long as it can. This way I can go to baseball games etc and if I have a large enough battery the computer would be where I left it when I get back.