Where does this wire go?

I purchased an atom 330 m/b, a 2.5″ hard drive, a case, and an m2-atx. I should get the parts by monday then I’m going to migrate my stuff over to the new box. I think I ended up spending about $300.00 for the stuff. I’ll update the carputer page eventualy (I hope).

I went to mini-box and bought some components I’m going to throw in to replace the dell optiplex sx260.

I ordered the following components. The total cost including shipping was just shy of $250.00

2GB DDR2 Memory
P4-12V to P4-12V Cable for M2-ATX
M2-ATX
Intel D945GCLF2D mini-ITX Atom 2×1.6Ghz
M350 Universal Mini-ITX enclosure

I’m curious to see how the dual atom does compared to the p4 2.8ghz of the dell.

This isn’t a problem with the touch screen, but with a mini keyboard that has a built in touchpad. When I moved the mouse left or right the cursor went up and down. Going up and down did nothing. Clicking the left mouse button moved the cursor right a few pixels.

What I had to do was to edit /etc/modules.d/blacklist.conf and blacklist usbmouse and uncomment usbhid

I’m not sure if it is going to make the touchscreen stop working though. I’ll have to wait a few days to try it out. I took my system out of my car while the mechanics have a look at my transmission.

I uploaded my udev rules that I use so that my gps receiver and Elmscan get created with their own devices 100% of the time. It creates /dev/gps0 and /dev/elm0.

Without this either device would be ttyUSB0 and the other ttyUSB1 during initilization.

The link to the file is 50-myrules.rules

I was playing with the google maps api and created a traffic map. I will incorporate this into my car so I can see where the traffic is around me. I might try to see if I can find a way for it to alert me to upcoming traffic conditions even if I don’t have the traffic screen selected.

I’ve been playing with this program for about a week now. I came across it looking for something to build openstreetmap routes and while it doesn’t do that, it does allow you to keep logs of your trip and use the data from your odb-II port and gps any way you see fit. The author mentions exporting the log to a google earth kml file (which he includes a utility to do.) Also, another utility lets you export to CSV which you can load in your favorite spreadsheet.

What I really wanted was a set of gauges. Wouldn’t you know it, the author has included an application for that. I use it for throttle position, oil temp, and a few other things. I’m limited to what the obd-II port of my car will report, but I’m sure I’ll find other interesting stuff to add as well.

I was working with the developer on adding a compass as a gauge, and by tweaking his code I got a basic compass done. Using the gps for this is a nice addition to the gauges displaying the obd-II data, and fits in nicely with the whole idea of obd gps logging.

While his code still in its early stages I’m sure with enough people encouraging him he will continue to flesh out his code which I think would benefit many of us using linux for a carpc.

You can find more information about the obdgpslogger program at the authors website http://icculus.org/obdgpslogger/

I’ve been fighting a problem for a while. I use IceWM as my window manager. One feature I like is that I can open a window in a specific desktop. I have desktops named “NAV”, “Music”,”Weather” and I wanted to open a specific program in each one. My problem is that two of the applications are written in python so if I specify python as the application then both applications will start in the same desktop. My work around is to make a symlink to python called musicpython and weatherpython. Doing this and adding #!/usr/bin/musicpython at the beinging of my music program and #!/usr/bin/weatherpython at the beginning of the weather program allowed me to start them in their respective desktops.

I have wireless broadband for my car.   I also have a gps unit.  So I decide to combine the two and get current weather (well not second by second but relativly current.)  I wrote a program for Linux in Python using wxpython and the python-gps libraries.  It basically contacts noaa and requests the weather based on the location retrieved from your gps.

I wrote this for carPCs but I guess you could use it on a laptop while you are traveling.

My program to get weather using gps

For the last week or so I’ve been programing a very crude music player customized to the way I want to brows for songs. I pretty much have it complete and am just fine tuning it. If I ever get it to the point that I’m happy with it then I’ll put a link to it here.

I am also looking into implementing text to speech so I can have irc in the background without having to take my eyes off the road.

It was a fun day today.  My wife and I went to a carpc meeting to meet up with some people from the mp3car.com forums.  The attendance seems to be growing as we had 5 cars and 7 people show up.  Granted one of the people that went was my wife who just smiled and put up with the geeks.

We sat in the parking lot we met up at for an hour or so looking at each others setups and hung out and chatted for about an hour.  We then got in to our vehicles and caravaned over to the park for the BBQ.

ViViper1 supplied pretty much all the food.  We had loads of fun trying to cook it though.  We couldn’t get the charcoals to stay lit.  We had heavy winds which made even lighting a lighter difficult.

After what seemed hours we got the food on the grill and a little while later we were eating dogs and burgers.

We sat around and talked about car computers, cars,  and just stuff in general for about 3 hours and walked back to the cars.

We sat at the cars for a few minutes while people looked at my hybrid just to see what was under the hood.  After that it was a quite ride home as we listened to steaming music on the carpc.

Here are the few photos that I took.

lburton and ViViper1 cooking burgers

lburton and ViViper1 cooking burgers

ratio of lighter fluid to coals? About 1/2 can to 15 coals.

ratio of lighter fluid to coals? About 1/2 can to 15 coals.

lburton, rogerdugans, Eileen(my wife), and f1vlad

lburton, rogerdugans, Eileen(my wife), and f1vlad

Pictures from rogerdugans