Jeep Navigation System
Ok, this is pretty ugly, but it kinda works… Real-time GPS mapping using NASA topo maps. Still working on downloading the COMPLETE toporama 50k stuff (3GB to go!)
And some of the audio equipment interfacing:
Obviously quite a ways to go! I’ve been watching Ebay like a hawk for the correct FM tuner device and GPS receiver. Just a matter of time now. Missed out on a tuner on Monday. Damn users interfering with my ebay watching at work. Ha!
The buttons on the left are made in fvwmpager. Each button press takes you to a new virtual console with the desired application(s) running “full screen”. NAV is the GPS, Aud is the MP3/FMtuner, MIX is the audio mixer, etc., etc.
The really neat thing about the GPS software (http://www.gpsdrive.cc) is that you can interface just about any raster map into it and then you can add waypoints at will – even to a relational database in the back end for storing the waypoints…then you can interface to the 802.11 war driving software and save your annotated hot spots in the database as well. Hot spots appear as way points on the map with a little icon. Additionally, you can interface speech so that way points etc are called out… I thought it was pretty cool.
I still need to theme the applications and the interface to the same look and feel. No biggie, just a few hours of messing around with Photoshop/GIMP. (yeah, right)
If you are wondering about the funky screen size – the 1 DIN LCD touch screen that I want to use is 800×484 pixels. Hence the “widescreen” aspect ratio.
Notice the price of 512MB CF cards at Costco? Should be able to make the entire thing boot into RAM off one, maybe two CF cards and only using spinning disks for “temporary” data like maps and MP3s. No spinning disks means no volatile hardware to fail due to temperature, bumps, etc.
So far ZERO commercial software. (yeah, be mean – it looks it – LOL – form over function and all that)
You know you are a geek when…