Progress Report
July 18, 2004It has been a long time since I posted an update. But the work never stopped. TMRS has reached a level of maturity where it can be used in a navigation application. I have also build a sensor device to measure temperature, humidity and acceleration which communicates with the main board using serial connection. Also in works are designs for display and chassis for the DIN sized computer.
November 23, 2003
Added pictures section to this site. Programmed photo browsing function (screenshot in pictures section). Bought a PC/104 Vehicle Power supply module which neatly docks with my Single Board Computer.
October 19, 2003
TMRS appears to be working well with a server interface. I have written a quick and dirty program in C# to fetch maps over the network.
August 26, 2003
The project has once again taken a new direction. I have created an Open Source project called Tiger Mapping and Routing Server (TMRS). It is designed to be POSIX compliant and should run on many platforms. Its job is to run in the background and perform one of the following two tasks when requested by a higher level application:
- Given start and destination addresses, compute the best path (driving directions). This is mostly done.
- Given longitude/latitude, draw a map centered around that coordinate at a specified scale and return a JPEG or PNG image. I am currently coding this part.
January 06, 2003
A lot of progress has been made since the last entry. I have purchased a Deluo USB GPS sensor. I have designed the GUI and created modules to play radio and mp3s. I will post screenshots as soon as I have figured out how to capture from framebuffer.
December 24, 2002
Purchased a Hauppage WinTV/FM Radio card for my system. Found software to control the radio tuner and the volume. TV works fine in X-windows but not in framebuffer mode. Still working on this. I have abandoned the idea of using Gtk or Qt since the use of tiny widgets is not appropriate for car use. The interface needs to be super simple so the user does not spend any time trying to figure out which button to click. Also created mockups of the screen.
December 15, 2002
Started looking into the software that will be used for this project. Tried out DirectFB. It is a very low level library that lets you draw directly to the video framebuffer. Very cool, but in order to take advantage of code already written for mp3 player, GPS etc, I will have to look into using Gtk. I want to avoid using X-server, if possible. Good news is that Gtk has a port for framebuffer. The bad news is that I can't seem to get it to work! Stay tuned...
December 10, 2002
Purchased KILL-A-WATT meter from Radio Shack today for $40. Turns out that my development system consumes a mere 23 watts while playing mp3s! My Pentium 4 windows machine, on the other hand, consumes anywhere between 75 watts and 115 watts.
December 06, 2002
Managed to boot a minimal linux system from CompactFlash.
November 28, 2002
The construction of the development workstation is complete.