Car PC
The CarPC, which I have named Olivia (original name was Olga, but I had to change it) has been installed in my car today. Most of the crawling and rewiring were done by my friend Dennis, while I worked on the computer itself. We initially had problems getting the center console removed, but with enough patience, we eventually figured it out.
Right now, the computer won't do anything other than give out ip addresses through an ad-hoc network, and try to log everything it can get off the obd and gps devices. Future plans include having it permanently connected to the internet and setting it up to play audio and video files. The video part will definitely have to wait as I haven't bough a screen yet.
Access to Olivia is done through an ad-hoc network named Olivia. There is no need to set an ip address as Olivia will give you an ip address. SSH is enabled so anyone with the proper access can gain control of her.
Hardware:
M-350 casing from mini-box
M3-atx power supply from minibox
Intel Atom (D510)
1 GB RAM
320 GB 2.5" SATA - Seagate
Globalsat BU-353
Scantool obdlink
Linksys WUSB600N
Software:
Gentoo 10.1 64bit
gpsd 2.32
obdgpslogger revision 386
Speedbumps:
I ran into a bunch of problems during the setup of the computer itself, such as the network card giving me problems, obd device not being detected, and gps not logging at all.
The weirdest of these is the gps problem, as it simply went away when I unmerged then emerged gpsd. It got me stumped for a few days but I guess the Windows method of fixing things works for Linux too!
A more recent problem was the obd device not being detected. Symptoms were quite weird as the udev rules were being followed, obdgpslogger saw the device and attempted logging but nothing came back. Doing an ls -l /dev/obd showed me that it wasn't being liked properly. I was expecting a ttyUSB0 or ttyUSB1 but it showed something like /dev/usb/bus/001 or something similar. A quick look into the kernel config showed me that I didn't compile the module for FTDI. I recompiled and fixed that problem.
Before I figured that out, however, I ran into another problem regarding the wireless card. This time, it was a simple error of not recompiling and re-installing the manufacturer firmware/drivers of the card before rebooting. This was pretty simple to solve but a PITA to do, as I had to go upstairs and grab a monitor and a keyboard.
A few other problems encountered with the wireless card were setting up the ad-hoc channel and having the card show up intermittently. Sometimes it would show up as wlan0, other times it would be ra0. As wlan0, it never worked, checking the output of the bootup services showed me that the card isn't being detected. I put a rootdelay of 1 second in grub and that seems to have solved it. I guess the script was being started even before the usb devices were all fully detected and configured.
Ad-hoc has been solved by a simple script consisting of ifconfig and iwconfig commands. I'll soon have to move the setup of the ad-hoc network to wpa_supplicant to get an encrypted network. Right now, there seems to be no issue as the only accessible service on Olga is ssh. I'll have to set up iptables though to make sure no other ports are accessible.
I'm still in the process of getting the displaylink drivers to work so that I could put in my Lilliput UM-70C. It'll serve as my monitor for the time being while I look for a good touchscreen monitor.
pictures here
note: don't mind the last few pictures there as that was just Dennis being bored
note #2: pictures are somewhat outdated, these were taken with the old board (DGCLF2)
