carputers.org

A blast of e-mail was sent out on Monday to all the car computer and telematics stores around the globe by some former employees of the now defunct Infill and Maxan.    Apparently they have formed a new company called HTS.  The e-mail states they are accepting advan [...]

Part 2 of 2 - We take our Do-It-Yourself wireless USB monitor into the car.  Talk about this on our forums.   (link to part 1 of 1 )

[video:http://vimeo.com/3575718]

In this video blog we test out Dash Command Lite– an innovative way of displaying OBD-II data.   Talk about this on ourforums in our blog talk section .   If you like the video, buy dash command lite  here and get 10$ off the final version when it comes out in late spring or early summer.

[video:http://vimeo.com/3565136]

Community and Forum user Bugbyte (AKA: Tom Berry) explores more ways to connect your iphone to the screen in your car.     

Follow this discussion in our forums.

How to build your own wireless USB monitor - We took an IOGear wireless VGA device (GUC2015V), an M2-ATX, a Lilliput 8” monitor and a laptop battery to make a super hacked wireless monitor.  If you spent more than an hour on this you could really make this hack usable.  We couldn’t get more than 15’ of range out of this with line of sight, but it was fun to try.   Based on the amperage of the devices, we could theoretically get a few hours out of this per charge.

Get more detai [...]

The PND (Personal Navigation Device) and the Car computer are dead (prettysoon they will be).   Get the details on how we made this movie andhelp us kill them in our in car mobile device meshing forum.

[video:http://vimeo.com/3138900]

[video:http://vimeo.com/3139145]

Tom Berry, known on our forums as Bugbyte writes a long interestingreport about his thoughts on CES and the future of car computing.   See his report and talk about CES on our forums here: Tom has contributed almost 5,000 posts to the Mp3car community.  Hetraveled with Robert Wray to CES 2009 to video hot new technolog [...]

We were ambushed by this company’s PR team in the central hall of CES 2009.  We thought the last thing we need to do is talk about yet ANOHER iPod accessory.  We saw the product again in the Sands show case and decide this was worthy of a story.  It would be great to test one of these guys.  Let us know if you have tried one.

Talk about this on our forums:

[video:http://vimeo.com/2826216]

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Based on our experiences at CES this year MP3car is creating this newforum.   “Mobile phone meshing – Safely Connect your car to theinternet cloud ”

This forum is going to be a lot more than just connecting.  This isgoing to be the place to talk about hacking and meshing your mobilecomputing devices into the car.    If we can find a way to connectIphones and smart phones into existing in vehicle displays andcontrols, this will be a wonderful benefit for those of [...]

We talk with John Xu, the US reprenative for Lilliput.  He tells us about some new models that are in the works.   

Talk about this on our forums here:

[video:http://vimeo.com/2818138]

We talk with Business Development manager of Intel's NAND group, Robert Allshouse.  He talks about Intel’s SSDs which are now hitting mass production.  The products are guaranteed to work from 0c-70c.  They use less power and take far more of a beating than their disk and cheaper flash counterparts.  Just get ready to unload your wallet.

 Talk about this on our forums:

[video:http://vimeo.com/2819829]

We have been working with ICO for about 2 years to build out the in vehicle user interface for the satellite they launched late last summer.  We built a new custom UI based on StreetDeck, integrated with their satellite modems, added data services and even implemented a program listings interface.  We are a bit biased but this looks like it is going to blow away cruise cast with a small antenna, a great price point and an array of bi-directional data services all augmenting their 10-15 chan [...]

It is amazing how small, cheap and low power computers are getting.   The show floor was littered with them so we took a sample of one in this clip below.  Running a quicktime MOV on the faster unit in this movie took up 60% of the CPU so some testing is probably in order.  Over the last 12 years of working on computers I have seen tons of motherboards.  Even some that are very expensive from big name companies can be riddled with driver problems or other small quirks.

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The brutal trail to bringing a car computer to market is littered with casualties of failed products.  We certainly have gotten run over a few times.  Vizualogic's booth at SEMA was significantly scaled down.  At CES this year, they have no booth and no published display suites. Audiovox is suing them for patent infringement.   Anyone who is bringing a computing product to market better fasten their seat belt.  It is a rough ride.    

Talk about this on our forums:

Tom Berry (bugbyte) and Italk about our closing thoughts on CES 2009.    The main theme thisyear from CES is having all of your devices connected and havinglocation aware content.  The biggest challenge is going to be fordevice manufacturers and software developers to create products whichwill deliver this explosion of data in a way that users can consume it.These products must be aware of the users activity and location.  Forexample, if you are sitting down you will consume a [...]