Carputer, a quick guide

[Jamo]

And pray tell how did you do that?

My skills aren't that good Greg i've got about 50-75 jpegs i've got to colour convert from orange to red time consuming!

[Greg_S]

Yeah that looks better

[Greg_S]

That is quite a bit of work. you could create that as a new layer to go onto the image and assuming all of the images are the same size add it to each and then flatten the images

[iDub]

Good to see there are a few other Car PC guys with S2's. Ok, I've not even got my S2yet, but I've got all the Car PC bits ready to go in. Was just about to start the install in my Golf but decided to seel it just in time!

I've got a via M10k Nehemiah board, powered by an M1-ATX running a laptop DVD/CDRW drive, a 40gb laptop HDD and 512Mb RAM. The all-important interface is via a LinITX plus 7" widescreen touchscreen monitor. It's currently all sitting in my office at home whilst I finish developing the software.

As I'm a programmer, I don't like using other people's software when I can code my own to do the same thing. As a result I'm building my own front end for it, called iDub (hence the username). v1.0 will be MP3/WMA only, as I'm not that fussed about DVD/games/internet etc. The next version will introduce sat nav via Destinator. I'm one of the lucky ones who managed to get hold of the unlocked SDK and a full set of maps. It's all good.

As for fitment, the centre vents will be going and the switches moved to the HU location, creating a nice space for a screen as Jamo mentioned above. The DVD is very slim so may fit in below the screen if I'm lucky.

I'm not sure where to put the case yet though. It's currently in a Morex case which is approx 25x30x7 cm. I don't mind building my own though, as I'm a bit handy with wood/fibreglass etc. Any ideas will be appreciated.

[Greg_S]

keep us posted on the progress with this. how difficult is it developing the front end

[iDub]

The front end is a real PITA to develop. The major problem I've got is making sure it does everything I want it to, without being overly complicated to use. The coding side of things is quite easy, though I'm teaching myself VB.Net whilst building it (I'm used to VB6 and it's way different).

The other issue is doing the graphics. I'm by no means an artist, and I'm struggling to come up with something I'm happy with looks wise. At the moment I'm concentrating on the functionality, so the looks can wait. The app is fully skinnable, so I can always sort the graphics later.

The current MP3 player screen looks like this at the moment (excuse the fuzziness caused by photobucket's resizing):

[Jamo]

Well started playing with this again and was thinking of integrating this into my car for in-car vagcom stats

http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/rr-plugins/116143-vag-scope-heads-up-display-front-end.html

http://s2central.net/vagcom_4.html#basics