up up and away!

Spent weekend up at Leysin and Chateau D'oex for the baloon festival. Sat was grey and snowy / windy so not much flying. Sunday was superb tho - pics on flickr

KITT updated?

OK Wishlist time.

I'd like some sort of navigation system for the car. Yes I could buy a tomtom or suchlike, but whats the geek factor in that. Nope, what I'd really like is some sorta carpc. Now that Atom based motherboards are cheap, and SSD flash (certainly in the small storage capacity I'd need) are cheap(ish) this is becoming a sort of sketch plan. I'd still need to get a nice touchscreen and interface knocked up, and have a connection to the car amp (manufacturer fitted nice system)

So in no particular order:
* Touchscreen fitted 'neatly' in car
-- it needs to have big 'bloke sized' buttons on the screen for doing tasks, so I don't have to look away - do you look down at the car radio?
-- some sort of scriptable interface: eg 'upload all tracks since the last upload'
* GPS receiver
-- Datalogging for openstreetmap
-- Navigation (doh!)
-- Geofencing to allow comms when parked at home
* Wifi and or GPRS/HSDPA connectivity
-- limited storage in the car, download $music from home store - treat it as a small player rather than a full rsync copy.
-- kismet anyone?
-- remote upload of tracks
-- download of traffic reports
* OBD connection for datalogging.
-- correlate engine conditions to position - if you're revving the engine is that because you're going up a twisty hill or because you're a numpty.
* Accelerometer (wiimote velcro'd to dashboard?)
-- Get relative acceleration of car, not just position

Oh, and it should be cheap :-)

TODO: 2009

Following mrbens posting, I thought I'd knock up a quickie list of my own for comparison next year

• Learn French. This has to be a priority seeing as I wish to stay out here.


• Get a more permanent job - EGEE funding only lasts till next May...


• Get the mini-itx working in some media-server form


• Do stuff with Asterisk


• Improve Skiing


• Do more mapping with OpenStreetMap around the area.

That should keep me occupied for a while :-)