Projects of the month

[ElTaco]

Ok so I'm undertaking two projects at home.

Project 1: MythTV PVR
What is it: Tivo move over cause MythTV is going to replace you! Ok not really, however Tivo does have limited uses while a computer running PVR software can do so much more. What do I mean. Well check out MythTV.org but, it can do the full functionality of a Tivo, in other words, pause, record, replay live tv. It also goes beyond to allow you to play simulators on your TV, store your entire mp3 collection, hold your pictures, ripped DVDs and then some. In other words its a complete multimedia solution, the kind the MS/Bill Gates has been trying to make for a while. The draw back of course is that you need to build it.

So to build it I went out and purchased some parts. Started with a small form factor case, a Haupauge 350 PVR card, 1256Gb of ram, 2.4 Ghz PIV CPU I had around the house, 2x400Gb HD (total of 800Gb for those who can't add) and of course a DVD/CD Burner. The video card is an nVidia 5500 Dual video + svideo card. The system will also be getting a wireless combined keyboard/touch pad, it will be able to use my wireless joystick and maybe some USB console style gamepads once the system is up and running.

I just installed Linux, Fedora Core 5. Next I will have to install Myth TV and all the things that go along with it like the addons for the games, music, pictures, TVGuide, remote controll software, etc... Then I will be able to do it all in my livingroom. Down the line I will probably get a 2nd Hauppauge card so I can record 2 or 3 shows at a time. Now all I need is a nice big TV and I could be all set....



Project 2: GPS for the Car
GPS prices have been coming down a lot but a decent map enabled GPS still starts at close to $500 or more. Now it is hard to beat that price, especially considering that if you get a TomTom top of the line series GPS machine it has a 20gb drive in it so it can do directions, music and pictures, which is a good deal. About the only thing that could beat that is an actual computer. And as it happens, I just happen to have a PIII 450ghz Laptop available with its screen busted and one with the screen in tact. I have two options. I can build a fully integrated system where the 'PC' is mounted in the trunk and you mount a small LCD up front or you just mount a laptop up front in the passenger area and do some cabling for the GPS.

Ok so to start out, I purchased a US Globalsat BU353 USB GPS receiver ($65). It is one of the waterproof GPS systems that Globalsat sells and as it hapens, it is magnatic so it is easy to install into your car. You can either install it on your trunk like I probably will or do it on your roof. BestBuy and co can install an antenna like that for you for less then $100 if you aren't comfortable doing it. This plugs into the USB port on the laptop. Now all you need is some software and viola, you technically have a GPS solution. The software can run you some money, but it depends on what you get. You can get MS Streets for relatively cheap, but there are actually better products. One such product is ALK's CoPilot, which looks and functions very much like a Tomtom or other built in GPS units. It does support voice control and can run very nicely on touch screen LCD's or tablet PCs. One drawback is that CoPilot goes for $299, which is kind of expensive for personal use. It does work on some phones and can even connect back to ALK so that you have trackable cars, which means that if you have a nice Palm or PocketPC phone with Bluetooth and a data plan, you can get yourself a bluetooth enabled gps unit and CoPilot and you have a $300 GPS device that your family can track. Its actually a great solution for companies that want to track the location of employees/trucks through the web.

Anyway, once you have the laptop and the GPS device and mapping software, you are set to go. Install Windows, install the GPS and the software, mount your laptop somewhere or just put it on the seat next to you (not very safe but it works). Then you want to run some power to the laptop. You can order car chargers that you can either just plug into your cigarett lighter or actually run to your battery. Run an audio out cable to your stareo. If you have a Tape deck still, it allows you to go the cheap route and just put one of those old stule tape cd audio solutions in, if not then you have to run a cable to the back of your head unit. Alternatively, you can purchase a 7" touch screen for around $200 and just mount that. Run a serial and Video cable to the laptop or PC that you mount in your trunk. The GPS unit can be mounted on your trunk, which is an easy install, and all that is left is an audio cable into your stereo and you are good to go. If you have the money, you could even purchase a PCMCIA cell card and buy a $60/mo data internet plan from just about any cell provider and you have a 128kb/s internet connection anywhere in the US. As an example, Verizon sells their card for $50 and $59/mo for the data plan w/2 year agreement. Verizon actually claims almost DSL speeds, which would be fairly fast browsing. US Cellular's card is more expensive and their service isn't nearly as fast, but then again I've seen their service but I haven't seen Verizon's so I can't verify Verizon's speeds.

Anyway, the only real thing to worry about at this point is power. There is actually a decent solution for power. Use a UPS. Buy a small 350VA UPS for $50. Disable the stupid audible alarm and wire that into your car's battery. Then just hook the Serial or USB cable to your PC and set it up so that 5-10 minutes after power loss, you want the PC to go to sleep. Finally, just get a wireless keyboard that you can use to enter addresses quickly or of course to use with the PC when not driving and you have a fully computerized car. As a last resort to protect your battery, you can put in an inline switch that will kill your PC access to the battery when the voltage drops to 11 or 10 volts. this will allow your car to still start without any problem even if for some reason your computer tries to pull too much power from it.



So any ideas or recommendations? I'm not sure how far I'll get with the car project, but I'll try to post pictures of both as I go along.

[jiminphilly]

^ Inspector Gadget

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

ET, you seriously need to get your hands on KnoppMyth.

Keep FC5, and give Knoppmyth it's own dedicated root partition. Let FC5 and KnoppMyth share the Home directory and the swap partition.

[Mister Bushice]

I bought a Tom Tom GO 700 for $800 bucks. It has an awesome suction cup design that adheres to the windshield, it has a belt pack for use when biking or walking, it has a bazillion features and a really nice big clear screen. It plugs into the cig lighter, and also synchs with my treo phone via blue tooth, although I haven't used that feature. I can also subscribe to traffic updates with tom tom, and I get two years of free map updates.

I figure that over the course of a year, it will have paid for itself in time saved by not having to backtrack, take the time to map out driving routes, and finding the shortest routes. not to mention never having to look at maps while driving.

Also, I can deduct it as a business expense.

However the portability and compactness of it is are major pluses, as we own three cars and I rent cars for long business trips.

Also, there are phones and PDAs that have GPS software you can get and install.

Your project sounds complex and bulky equipment-wise, and I'm wondering if you'd end up spending more money with fewer features than if you went a commercial route

Unless driving a "sneakers" style van after a while is your goal. :)

Overall I'd say the average person would want to weigh the labor involved, but it will be interesting to see how well you can Mcgyver this project. :)

[ElTaco]

I bought a Tom Tom GO 700 for $800 bucks......

Overall I'd say the average person would want to weigh the labor involved, but it will be interesting to see how well you can Mcgyver this project. :)

Well Cost is an issue, however consider my situation:

I don't do any of the things you do. Only have one car. Its usually me, myself and I on long trips, of which I actually take a decent amount of, problem is I already know the route for most of them. Oh well.

Your average GPS does:
GPS
Some higher end units add on extra features such as MP3 or phone connectivity.

A built in PC will do:
GPS on a 7" or 8" screen
Music
Video
Internet connectivity* (requires wireless service)
Live updates (see above)
Gaming
WiFi
etc....

Your cost was $800

here is how mine breaks down:
Laptop (already have so $0)
Screen ~$200
GPS (usb) $62
GPS software I want (CoPilot Live) $199 (unless I can snatch it for free)
Cables ~$100
Mount ~$50
Work - depends on how I choose to install it all...
Total: ~$600

So, here are some points to be made. Because the GPS is a USB magnatic mounted waterproof unit, it can travel fairly easily to other cars, I just need a laptop and software to use it, which if I'm smart I can just take the laptop out of my car.
Because the GPS is outside the vehicle, it goes through less interference so it should work a little better then a GPS inside.
Realy at its simplest of installations, I could just put a laptop inside the car and run the usb cable to it and its a gps unit. I just figure in my own car, I don't really want the laptop just sitting there. If I really wanted to be neat, I'd replace the radio (a 2 din unit) with a touch screen and run the computer cables to that, I just don't feel like doing that much work plus that would drive up the cost of the install by another $200.

[ElTaco]

KnoppMyth it is. You know its been a while since I installed so called 'fun' packages and I always get annoyed. I figured I'd install MythTV first by just comping, then I saw the 20 things you had to install first before you even contemplated mythtv so I said ok, lets just do the packages but that didn't work. Even though Yum and Apt-Get are supposed to take care of dependencies, they certainly didn't for me. So whie all I really had to do was go out and get all the shit and install it, I said fuck it and decided to go with KnoppMyth. It works great, except that it doesn't. Trying to trouble shoot it now.

If I get fed up, I'll just build a 'windows' based system, which has the advantage of also being able to be a gaming system too.

[Donovan]

Haupauge 350 PVR card

Great card. If you want to use it with a Windows box try GB PVR. I did and I'm quite impressed. It works in the backgroud without using hardly any resources and outputs to my TV perfectly. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of MythTV, but there are plugins available that do most it.

Next I'd like to get a dual HD tuner card when they become available.

[ElTaco]

Looks good. I've also been looking at SageTV. Its the only PVR that allows remote streaming so you can watch your shows wherever you are. Of course its not free either so we'll see what happens.

[ElTaco]

Ok so I've been doing some research on and off on GPS software. So far I have had a chance to work with 3 of them and here is what I've found:

So I got a chance to finally play with Iguidance($109), Microsoft S&T($29) and Delorme ($49).
Delorme: Wow, Delorme is bad. I think a blind man could follow a street and report his location better than that package did. Not only is it bad at GPS location but it's like being in a car with 3 kids and a wife, it just won't shut up. It stays very accurate to the current GPS location or where it thinks the GPS location is, which tends to be not so good and usually off the actual street you are on. They try to make up for this by giving verbal cues to stay on the current street and then when you get to the next turn, make the turn. Very bad, don't try it.

MS Streets & Trips was about as good as you could expect from MS. It has relatively good maps and did good on the GPS stuff, however its annoying to use windows menus and features when you have a touch screen laptop or even a keyboard while moving in a car. One thing that was interesting was that when I entered a street name that was less then 2 years old, it seemed to know its relative location, even though it didn't actually show the street in the list. Not sure how that happened but it did impress me because not even Google has that street. One problem with the package is that the voice is very quiet. If you are just listening for directions from a laptop speaker, you will have a hard time hearing them, especially if you have family and music in the background. My recommendation is that if you are a family man that takes a twice a year trip and you want a simple solution to use with a laptop, go with MS S&T. At $29.99 (at Walmart) you really can't beat the price and feature wise, this software makes perfect sense for planning out your trips. You can create way points/stop overs and it does very well if you have some type of a GPS device. (in a car make sure you can put the antenna in the window or on the roof).

iGuidance on the other hand is awesome I managed to get a copy of it for free to try out. It has over 2gb of maps for the US and Canada, all of which now resides on my PC. It took a long time to install because it creates the map from the CDs. In other word, if you don't have much space, you can install just the maps you need and it will build the maps and points of interests according to what state data you want. This is different from MS S&T in that MS allows you to read the map off of the CD, which could be slower. It did extremely well with the GPS stuff and while its still using windows menus, it also has GPS like menus that you can bring up on the screen. I still think that usability wise, ALK's Copilot still wins because it doesn't use the usual windows menu system or windows environment for that matter at all. iGuidance puts the different 'features' into different Windows. One nice feature, that is all together useless for local usage like EMS and Fire is that it has a databank of information on sun rise and set times. If you have internet connection, you can get the current weather of you location which is nice but most people don't really have an internet connection in their car. I must say I was impressed with the map quality for my area. It is 1 year out dated but what impressed me was the quality of detail for streets and exits on the map. They included the turn leafs for exits and you followed it exactly while getting on the highway. It also had information on Rt 7 where streets crossed direction on the highway so it could give you turn around. It was also much faster in keeping up with the current location and rather accurate on distance then the other two programs. As I said, if it wasn't using windows, I think it would be hard to decide which program to use, but right now I would still side with CoPilot.

ALK's CoPilot: If you are interested in a good proven GPS solution for a handheld device or a laptop, I don't think much will beat CoPilot. Without even using the software, what impressed me was that this company supplies the DOD with maps on a yearly basis and has been involved with GPS solution for the trucking industry for years. The company itself has around 20 years of experiance. If you have one of the many other GPS softwares, you can send it in to them and get the package for $99 instead of the usual $199 price tag. I've seen the software in action and I think it has a much better GPS interface made for use in a car then all the other packages. I'll actually be sending in the Delorme software so that I can save about $50. I wish I had known how bad this software was so I could have just purchased the $30 MS S&T, made a copy of that and sent that in saving $80 instead of just $50. Anyway, CoPilot comes with a lot of features that make it useful both for long trips and for local guidance. Locally, it allows for quick data entery to find your destination and go. It automatically updates the directions if you get off of the planned route (so does iGuidance and even Delorme, but MS S&T requires you to hit F3 to adjust the route.) It has safety features built in so that the map can actually disapear from the screen if you go over a certain speed so you don't look at the map instead of the road. It will continue to give you verbal directions. It will dim your screen at night, which it knows based on your GPS location, Time and Date.
What makes it really neat for a small business is that if you don't mind purchasing a wireless connection from Verizon or any other phone company, you can actually track your own trucks and communicate with them. You can send them new jobs or even load in directions into the software. Again, buying wireless internet is a bit costly for the average family man, but for a business, it might be a worth while expense. CoPilot also has information for RV people, scenic roads, compressed gas tank information and Toll road information to get you to your destination the way you want to go. As far as I can tell, it really offers the most features of any package I've heard of or tried.

Well that is my current review. Is there anyone else who has used another GPS software? Does TomTom offer features that CoPilot doesn't? MrB, I'm almost surprised you wouldn't be interested in something like this for your sales guys. Combined with the laptops they already have and a cheap GPS(USB) antenna and maybe wireless internet, it would give you a lot of options as the Boss like tracking their milage, gas consumption, location and giving them the ability to get from Point A to Point B faster and safer then ever before.