has anyone used the palm or other mini computers for navigation in their car ? i was thinking of doing this.

 

I have an Axim and it's just too hard to drive and use that thing at the same time!!! The screen is too small and my ride is just too bumpy to use the stylus.

 

does the map move while you are driving ?

 

i navigate the old fashion way..a map, read street signs, directiond from yahoo or map quest, and common sense.

 

I posted some information and pics of my Ipaq using the Pharos GPS module and Mapopolis software at:

http://www.v6performance.net/forums/...0&pagenumber=2

 

It would if I had GPS.

 

Mine isn't completely finished yet, still debating on weather to spend $400 for a touch screen VGA monitor, or $200 on a 7" and mount it in my double DIN hole. I have a mini ITX 1ghz mobo with 512MB of ddr266, a little 20gig laptop HD for boot(I use a laptop drive because even though it's slow, it takes getting bumped a lot better than a high speed drive, and I use a little 120w power supply that plugs directly onto my board, I have USB 802.11, GPS module, and two different USB2.0 extrernal drive cases one with a dvd drive and one with a 120GB maxtor, got the 120G for free when I upgraded my work machine to a 1TB Raid 5 using 4 250GB maxtors, I got the 20GB laptop drive for free when I upgraded my work laptop to a 60GB drive, I got the DVD drive and case for free when I upgraded to a DVD burner at work, so all in all so far I have $180 for the mobo and processor, $30 for the RAM(fry's had a special), $30 for the external case for the HD, $20 for a usb 802.11 netgear adapter, $90 for my usb gps "mouse" and $70 for the power supply. right now I play it through my existing monitors, but my front monitor sucks and it's hard to navigate whiel trying to look at the back on lol, so the front one needs to be updated. So far $420, even if i get the 7" xenarc touchscreen vga monitor I'll be close to the price of a garmin streepilot II and have way more features. Oh forgot, I spent $120 on a 64 channel USB DAQ and I/O card(it has 64 channels of I/O ports than I can use to watching or power things in the car, so far I have the software written to control windows, sunfoors, locks, monitor the ignition so when I shut the car off it rolls up the windows, closes the sunroof, locks the doors(which arms the alarm) then tunrs itself off. I plan on writing more software so I can watch the Tach, throtte position and anything else I can get my hands on.

 

Damn illusion, that is one hell of a setup. What do you do for a living? I'm a senior at PSU majoring in computer engineering and I'd love to start that sort of project in my car. I built a wireless controller for my underbody neons last summer. It was real ghetto because I used left over TTL ICs I had laying around but it worked. Anyhow, what language are you writing your software in? And how are you wiring up all those components to the I/O card. Are you using relays or does it output 12v?

 

for the analog inputs they're just direct connect since it's just a little tap. For the control outputs I'm using 4N35 Opto isolators to drive the relay. I used VC++ to write a little chunk of code to give me kernal level access to the parallel port so I can toggle those pins too, and I wrote everything else in VB6(.net = .bad). For a living I'm a staff test engineer(I write programs and design hardware to test semiconductors, I'm MSCS, BSEE and in another two years or so of night school I should be MBA as well ), my speciatly is High power regs and PWMs, and I dabble in a bit of RF(but it makes my head hurt), my current project is a PCMCIA power switch, with an I2C bus to toggle the internal switches, it's 3 input 6 output with any input able to go to any output, pretty neat little toy, but a pain in the butt. It was a nice change from my regular high power reg, my last one was a 1MHz buck regulator, that nasty little sucker was mean, if you accidently farted in it's direction while sorting wafers the next 100 dice would fail lol.

 

that's sweet. i wish i worked more with hardware at my internship. i'm gonna be starting my senior project in another month or so. i'll be building an autonomous robot that traverses a maze.

i think if i started a project like that i'd get away from the windows platform. i'd go for freebsd and i'd write everything in c since it's native to unix. everything you're doing sounds awesome though. keep up the good work!