Cars as Personal Communication Devices? Maybe...

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.physorg.com/news2276.html' target='_blank'>http://www.physorg.com/news2276.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"When Bart Watson leaves home to go on a business trip, his personal communication services will accompany him. The e-mails he studied on his PC at home will also be available on the terminal in his car, where they are read to him by his handheld device while he drives. This seamless handover from broadband internet connection at home to DVB-T connection in the car is one of the research results by EU project DAIDALOS, which will be demonstrated at a public workshop in Stuttgart on 14 December...Among the technical demonstrations is the seamless use of a personalised communication service, like e-mail or digital video, while moving from fixed-line internet in the exhibition space at Stuttgart university to mobile broadcasting via DVB-T in a car parked in front of the building."</i><br /><br />This article brings up an interesting question: have you modifed your car to become a communications or digital media hub? The only mod I've done is to buy a stereo that will play back MP3/WMA burned onto CD-Rs. ;-) What about you? Any cool car rigs?

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Bad bad bad idea. When you're in the car, concentrate on driving! Listening to emails requires a degree of concentration unlike music, and this is just asking for more trouble. Let's not talk about watching videos!

[Felix Torres]

Nope.
I only went as far as installing an auxiliary line-in adapter and a pair of brackets so I can plug in my digital music player.
My car is transportation, not an office.
I suppose a travelling salesman or a lawyer might think otherwise, but me, I don't *want* to be accessible 24x7.

[RenesisX]

A few years back when I was still working for one of the world's largest on-line music stores I was tasked with creating the world's first 5.1 commercial album download in WMA Multi-channel.

As part of this my colleague and I couldn't resist upgrading our cars to 5.1 sound, and then building a full microATX PC which went under the seat along with a Creative Extigy hooked up to the 5.1 amp. We then fitted the very first 7" widescreen touchscreens into the dash and wrote a very neat custom touchscreen interface which ran on XP Embedded to run the whole thing.

5.1 in a car sounds awesome. I love the way the backing singers sound like they are sitting in the rear seats hehe.

I did go as far as tapping into the ECU on my car to display a nice digital dashboard like on the Skyline R-34, but I've had to sell my wheels now to fund other business projects :(

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

OT, but I love the R34 GT-R's display. A pity that the computer only stores 30 seconds worth of data.

RenesisX, so how did the car experiment go in the end? I'm rather particular about these things being road hazards. BTW, was your car a RX-8?

[RenesisX]

Well, it was a great experiment and just got me warmed up for future ideas for when I have some more cash to spend in the near future. It was certainly not sensible to look at the display much while driving due to the positioning on the centre console - but my planned future version will solve this by replacing all the stock dials with small VGA screens.

The system could also play DVD ISOs, Divxs etc, plus we built a sat-nav system using the MapPoint ActiveX control and a GPS mouse.

RX-8 was a good guess, almost right ;) It was a 3rd gen RX-7. The RX-8 is a great car, but doesn't have enough power, especially as I often used to take mine racing.

My system could store unlimited data from the ECU - and in fact I'd often drive around for ages to get loads of data saved so that I could run it back through my software on my desktop, rather than trying to develop the program while sat in the very cramped passenger seat with a laptop burning my legs ;)

I do wanna get an RX-8 though - I think they're awesome, and they have space in the boot for doing some shopping, unlike the RX-7 ;)

It would be so much easier to tap into the ECU on the RX-8 to get all the data out for my digital dashboard too - it has both OBD-II and CAN-Bus I believe.