I bought a Nissan Micra K11 few month ago and I thought I would develop something — and set up in the car — what is able to communicate with my iPhone 4.
I didn't really think about to search something ready product on the market. It was clear from the beginning I would like to develop it by myself.
It is sure all of the data is available over the standard OBD connector what my car has, "just" I need to develop (set up) the hardware what is able to read out from the car's computer and supply them to my phone over wireless connection.
First, I thought I would like to use a little "just-what-I-need" hardware from Arduino and an operating system designed for that minimalistic hardware.
This hardware is not really so minimalistic how you would think because I need RS232, WiFi, strong CPU and 256MB RAM. This configuration would be necessary because I'd like to use some kind of web service to supply the data to my iPhone. Wireless because Apple reduced the bluetooth communication just for the headsets and no data communication available over the bluetooth layer.
Well, totally new hardware, new OS (I need to compile my Linux based OS for my Arduino board), develop the user software to this specialized environment... no. This would be just sucks - I thought. And the another stuff is this project has to be low-costed, everything has to be as cheap as possible.
I decided fast — buy some cheap and small PC on eBay, tune it a bit, drop a Debian on it with Apache and Tomcat, develop a JNI module for RS232 and then a web service for Tomcat. Done. That's it. Oh yeah!
I thought.
No, it is not that easy. Because when I dive into the system structure I've seen already where my system going far from the standard desktop configuration, just a fast summary:
- No hard-disk, CF card instead with IDE adapter
- No ATX power supply, DC-DC ITX car PC power supply instead
- No built-in wifi, USB dongle
Of course, I could buy a Car Computer with XY GHz CPU with a lot's of RAM and built-in WiFi but they're very expensive! Over 500€.
Over the next posts I'll explain how is my hardware were grown and how I had a fight with Debian and my crunchy new Sitecom USB WiFi module.
Well, it would be certainly amazing to see an old style Nissan Micra K11 car with a fancy carputer. How’s your carputer doing? It’s true that building one can be a bit hard, but if you come prepared with the tools and the know-how, you’ll get through with it, no problem. And yes, if you can build your own carputer, then it would certainly save you a lot of money.
ReplyDelete@Andre Brennan