greene76

Found a few interesting resources for mac-mini carputer. It seems that a dc power supply is coming out in April/May, go to this link www.carnetix.com This allows you to run off of the car battery without the need for an inverter, also protects mac during cranking, and other drain/surge instances. I think it will also have auto start/shutdown ability. I think I remember a touchscreen with drivers for a mac, seems like the carputer thread that mazdamaniac had up used a compatible touchscreen. Add to this any knowledge you have, and I'll keep digging.

greene76

Touchscreen with drivers for mac- http://www.xenarc.com/product/700ts.html

Japan8

I guess my only concern about the carnetix PSU's are the power levels. Granted there are many people with tower case ATX PC's and P4 processor car pc's which would require a bigger PSU, but do you really need all that processing power? Do you really want to put that much of a drain on your car electrical system, especially when the RX-8's throttle is drive-by-wire and the steering is electric assist...

IMHO, the real goal in putting together a car system is not to go crazy and put the fastest CPU you can buy in there. What you need to do is figure out your needs... what will you use it for exactly... and be realistic. Once you have that figured out, look at how much processing power will it really take to accomplish that goal. For mobile systems like these you should always be trying to go for the least amount possible... small and power conservative.

robertdot

Fortunately, G4s aren't as power hungry as Intel/AMD machines. I think I'd still go for the 1GHz VIA EPIA boards + Linux if I could get all the ODBII/CAN tools for it.

Labop

Yeah, I was thinking about a mac mini. But since I have this crushed powerbook with no screen, I'm going to use it. I verified that the video out is still working (thank god it wasn't crushed either), and all the internals are fine. Just the lcd, backlight, and case are destroyed. I'll post pics when I get the chance. If you look at it from the front, instead of being parallel with the table, you can see it arch.

greene76, did you see the thread on there with the guy who is developing his own front end? Looked damn nice. But he's not releasing it yet. In another thread some guys were porting the pc version of their front end, that looked pretty good too. If not, I've played with konfabulator and could do something with it or tiger.

Have you given any thought to input devices other than touch screen? I'm thinking of a wireless keyboard and a powermate (that thing that looks like a volume ****). The powermate might be useful for controlling itunes, plus it will kind of look like that sytem in BMW's.

robertdot is right, power drain is a big concern, but any G4 option we go with will be good for the powersavings, especially a laptop. They're typically designed with power conservation in mind. I think mine will be OK, it's a three year old G4 400 MHz. It's not super fast, but when it was undamaged, I could still use it for serious graphic/web design.

For all I've been through with Silverado (the name of my powerbook) the least I can do for it is give her a good home and a new life in my 8. My only issue would be the 9 GB hard drive, but that I can upgrade, of just use my 60 GB external (aptly named Tonto). :D I think my next powerbook wil be Lone Ranger, to complete the set.

I've been doing some checking and it seems that the only way to get ODB/CAN data is to have VirtualPC running. Bugger.

robertdot

A powerbook is a great option. Good deal that you have one.

JM1FE

I'm having someone work on a CANScan front end for OS X (utilities + digital dash), which will be part of a complete Mac-based car system - Mac Mini/Xenarc/Frogpad/iMate/etc. More details when I have something to show. I promise that having a cool in-car system won't mean being held hostage to Redmond for much longer.

Labop

JM1FE, you are awsome. any idea on the price of this utility? or a timeline?

greene76

Labop, I have the powermate, was thinking of using it too aka bmw media ****, but I came accross some usb touchpads that would be more practical. Also found a few remotes, but not one for the mac...yet. Keep the info flowin, I plan on making a final decision by may, hopefully someone will have some good info by then.

JM1FE

No price or timeline right now - I'm not going to over-promise and under-deliver, just wanted to say that I've got something in the works. I'm not a developer, I just have to keep my developer motivated :D.

Personally, if/when we get the utility in condition for a first release, I'd like to GPL it, set up a project page on sourceforge.net, and let others have a hack at it to make it better. In light of the aforementioned keeping-the-developer-happy, It may be (inexpensive) payware if there's enough market to make it worthwhile. Don't know yet.

It'll be written in pure Java/Swing, and so will have a native (Aqua) appearance on OS X. It should run identically on OS X/Linux/Win32. Solaris and FreeBSD versions are not planned due to unavailability of the the USB chipset driver for those platforms. Just remember - it's vapourware unless/until we announce otherwise!

One thing to keep in mind - the hardware interface is USB 2.0, which means newer PowerBooks, G5s, G5 iMacs, the Mini, etc. If you have an older PowerBook with a PCMCIA slot, you'd need a PCMCIA usb 2 card for it.

robertdot

If someone wants to build a command line app while your at it, that would be nice. Maybe I could do that one day.

JM1FE

Knock yourself out: http://www.ghg.net/dharrison/OBDScanAPI.PDF :D

What exactly would you want to do with a command-line app? Not sure we can fit that in at first.

robertdot

You can pass commands to the command line in Dashboard. I don't want to have crazy OBD stuff up on screen ALL the time, but I'd like to be able to see it on demand w/o launching a program. If I could throw a command line like "odbcommand --afratio" or "odbcommand --instantaniousmpg" I could put that in a pretty Dashboard widget with some quartz graphics. But, I'll need 10.4 first...

Anyway, this is good, because I'm a web designer. I do alot of PHP and have done some VB (real, not vbscript) and have a little experience in C++, so I think I could maaaaaybe hack out a command line application if I had everything I needed (if I could ever figure out XCode), then do the interface in Dashboard.

Just my thoughts.

JM1FE

Ahhhhhh! Got it. I'll pass the suggestion on to my developer. The Dashboard widgets definitely have the potential for a sexier interface. Particularly if you use something like a USB Frogpad and set up one-touch hotkeys... poke a button and get the widget of your choice (like Exposé).

robertdot

After reading that paper, I think it might be better to have a daemon running to keep the connection alive (and deal with all that connection junk) and have a CL app to query the daemon. It says the "s" needs to be sent "periodically" or it may disconnect and take a full second to reconnect (which if every single command issued starts it's own connection, it will be too slow for any real monitoring). Since, "The user needs to insure that each communication from the computer to the protocol converter will occur within 25ms of receipt of the S character," a daemon would be the way to go for command line.

JM1FE

Right. I know that my guy is planning to have the communications and UI as separate modules within the code, so it may not be a big deal to make it launch faceless (as a daemon) so it can be queried/commanded from a shell. I'll ask him.

Labop

Ok, help me out here, what does odbcommand --afratio do?

looking at that dashboard, I actually like it more than kofabulator. Surprising. Hey, the tile game is back!

That automator is nice, I looks its a revamped easier to use applescript tool? No coding required?

JM1FE

Not a damn thing, right now. He was describing how he would like something to work, should it exist, which it does not.

robertdot

if i coded this command line program, "odbcommand --afratio" would return the air-to-fuel ration :P

I started looking more at the OBDII, and I think that CAN would be better to implement for the '8. I don't know that ODBII would provide all the info needed to do the cooler stuff... I just can't find any specs on it (like the paper you attached). If you have any of that info, feel free to post it...

Labop

Shoot, sorry, I see it now. I had a blond moment. :D

fixedd

maybe it would be usefull if someone would hack out all the real code into a set of libraries that can be built with GCC then everyone can do it their own way... if you have all of the libraries it should be a trivial matter to make a cli app or a gui app or whatever...

of course we'd still need some sort of OBDII -> USB adapter. it's my understanding that OBDII is just a serial communication (like the serial ports on older Macs and all PCs) so it shouldn't be too hard but I'm not a "hardware guy" and I haven't seen any out there. I've seen OBDII -> serial and there are serial -> usb, but daisy chaining together a bunch of adapters seems really awkard and ineligant

robertdot

I think those that have the means to build the product plan to do this thing called "Sell" the program, which means giving away source code is counter productive. But if it were open source...

JM1FE

http://www.ghg.net/dharrison

My developer friend is trying to do this with the USB CANScan model. A usbserial driver is available for Mac OS X for the USB chipset that Harrison uses, and support for that chipset has been in the Linux kernel since 2.4.20.

JM1FE

Hey, I'm all for open-sourcing it. My developer friend kind of wants a little return for his efforts. I'm pondering a means to satisfy both of us, but it's way too early for that yet.

robertdot

I'm pretty sure some solution can be reached, even if it is a donation thing.