My Car Pc Project

I am Jon Hoare and I have been working on a Car PC project for the last 7 years, ever since I passed my driving test and had my first car.

The original Car PC, was made up of old desktop components I had lying around the house, housed in a custom made wooden case in the boot of my car. This ran Windows XP Professional and ran a custom Application that I wrote in VB6, that responded to voice commands to play music, as it had no screen.

My application grew larger, integrating Winamp, Google Earth, Videos, and my own Front End, which was displayed on a VGA only display. Obviously, the computer components had to grow alongside the software development, to cope with the new application, and eventually invested in a Touchscreen to interface easily with the computer.

I eventually did away with "Reinventing the wheel", so to speak, and decided to invest in a product called Centrafuse, that a great friend of mine had recommended. This allowed me to use all the core features of the product such as...

• Satellite Navigation
• Music
• Videos
• OBD-II
• Internet Browser
• WiFi
• Bluetooth Hands Free

On top of these core features, I was also able to write my own "Plugins" using C#.Net to expand the software further. I built a plugin that did the following ...

• Had 3 Modes (Based on Knight Rider) ... Normal, Auto, Pursuit
• K8055 USB Interface board with the following devices attached

• Green LED strip (Passenger and Driver Footwell) - Normal Mode
• Yellow LED strip (Passenger and Driver Footwell) - Auto Mode
• Red LED strip (Passenger and Driver Footwell) - Pursuit Mode
• Used to originally turn on a RADAR based Speed Camera detector (This was replaced by my GPS module in my program)
• Front Red LED Scanner Effect (Based on Knight Rider), Just for giggles! This had no real use, or would be used on the road as this is illegal in the UK and in many other countries.

• Auto Music Volume ATT based on the vehicle speed being less than 15MPH or if I was within a set proximity of a known place, such as a friends house.
• GPS Speed Camera Detection module. When enabled, would warn me by Voice that there was a camera nearby, the camera type (Fixed or Mobile) and based on the Speed Limit and the Vehicle Speed, would flash the Footwell LED Strips accordingly.
• Overspeed - Flash Red and Yellow
• Underspeed - Flash Green
• Unknown Speed Limit - Flash Yellow
• GPS Proximity warning of Points Of Interest (Friends houses etc)
• Traffic alerter to read the RSS Feed from the Highways Agency to alert me of any known traffic on the current road.

I upgraded the hardware in the car from desktop components in the boot to a Samsung NC10 Netbook. More than capable of running everything.

I then upgraded the Operating System from Windows XP to Windows 7, and also upgraded Centrafuse through from Centrafuse 2.0 through to Centrafuse 3.5.

Now for the juicy bit.

I had recently read that a port of Android Ice Cream Sandwich had been made for x86 machines. Now, this to me sounded really very cool! Even though I have an iPhone and there is a lot of banter amongst my friends between iOS and Android devices, I have always admired Android and thought this would be the ultimate ideal Operating System to run in the car. Android is an extremely lightweight operating system and oriented towards touch like devices. So it's time to give this bad boy a go!