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Inexpensive Dashboard PC
Kristian - Dreamless writes "Wanting to war drive with style? The other day I surfed the web to find a free dash pc solution to my car since the commercial ones cost around 2000-2500$ here in Denmark. I found DashPC.com and I must say this looks promising a very nice GUI and the features seems to be endless: Navigation with War driving, Multimedia and so on. Requirements? Low cost pc and a dash LCD display."
I develop on Linux everyday. I do LAMP too when called upon.
But sweet jesus, with every slashdotting of a LAMP site I have to wonder just how poor LAMP really is.
There is just no reason that dashpc's site should slashdotted so quickly.
Get a Hagstrom street atlas, a copy of the local paper, turn on the radio, and call somebody on your cell. All that should be distracting enough to get you killed in short order. That's the whole point of this, isn't it?
When did operating a two-ton piece of machinery at high speeds become relegated to an afterthought?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Slashdot tends to link car-pc stuff as if it's new and different from time to time, and they always link to some fringe stuff like one particular piece of software or one person's particular (usually fairly hackish) installation. They have actually linked to the dashpc project before -- when the interface was built in perl/tk and barely worked! (Actually it's still pretty hard to install and make work -- I'd say it's at least as hard to install as MythTV) Anyway, the reality is that there are hundreds or even thousands of computer projects driving around out there, and there are many possibilities for what one can do on any type of budget from an old 486 embedded board with a LCD display that plays MP3's to a full-on LAN of fast pc's for backseat passengers to play games.
The best resource I found when I started looking into car-pc stuff were the message boards at MP3Car.com. They have sections for hardware, software, cabling, audio, gps, networking, OBD-II, etc. There are thousands of users on there, and everyone is very helpful. The archives contain a lot of good information that became invaluable to me when I was building my own car-pc project. It is currently going through a new overhaul where I am fixing some problems with the original design and functionality and adding some new stuff like OBD-II and reversing camera as well.
Did it occur to you that these devices can and are being used to IMPROVE situational awareness. I make my living in the biomedical/human factors areas of cockpit design. Trust me, there is a lot of value in putting a well thought out design in a car. I also enjoy working on the car pc projects and I can assure you that I have yet to meet a person who is dumb enough to play a movie and try to watch it while driving. Imagine this: A guy driving along, flipping threw pages of a map with one hand, talking on the cell phone with the other, and the annoying sounds of a Home Alone Movie are playing for the kids in the back. On the other hand, the individual with the well designed computer system is driving along and puts a dvd into the console, the kids put on there headphones which so that he can still listen to his radio station while they watch the movie. An incoming call sends out a beep and full caller ID information comes up on the touchscreen he takes the call by pushing a button, which shuts off the radio and uses the car speakers for sound, his voice is captured by a mic in the dash. He hangs up the call with the push of a button and radio returns to it's previous state. He no longer needs to flip through a map because he has a gps display, and as he drives towards a preset destination, a voice comes over the speakers giving him directions.
When Virgin went out of the Internet access business, four years ago, they behind a lot of of Webplayer personal appliances in their customers houses, and even more in their warehouses. The 200MHz CPU was adequate for most car uses (by the standards of the time), and the low power 256MB DiskOnChip could hold most common OSs. It had IDE, USB, built in NIC or modem, room to wedge in some surplus slimline laptop CD drives, a built-in 800x600 color LCD (the Webplayer was VGA, but the LCDs were physically 800x600, and needed only a simple driver upgrade) etc.
/. today. Sure, it's nice -kudos to the builder- but 4 years is three cycles of Moore's Law, and scaling the cost/performance backwards, I get the feeling I must be missing some key feature. It only seems to be droolworthy for gawkers, not hands-on geeks.
Total draw was under 1 amp at 5v.
You could buy them directly from the company for $100 (Boundless was selling them for a bit more through internet auction houses, years later). I bought a few through a group buy, and one of them ended up in a car, and ran perfectly for three years until the car was rear-ended, cracking the screen (no, the computer wasn't in use - in fact, the car was being driven by a family member who didn't realize it was there at all)
That was a trivial weekend's work and $200 in total parts (hard drive, USB accessories, power supply etc.) four years ago. The GPS was added some time later (it was initially an MP3 player)
There were many other similar 'web appliances' at the time that I wonder what makes this particular project worthy of
Yeah, Moore's Law doesn't apply directly, but it's not a bad scaling metric for hobby project cost.
Car computers based on small surplus off the shelf systems are trivial for anyone interested in using them (vs. bragging rights for tech specs). If this article interests you, you could have a computer in your car two weeks from today, with minimal work (including eBay buying/shipping time)
Warn me when these guys are gonna be driving around and surfing p0rn at the same time!!!
Whatever happened to DRIVING while driving?