Siukalo.com 小家路
web home of babbo al
12/August/2008
During the test of my Magellan Triton unit. I need a backup plan in case the unit does fail on me when I need it the most. I have devised a backup plan. I have installed a CarPC into the car to do the tracking!
The mainboard I have used is from my old CarPC project. The board is a VIA EPIA N8000EG. I have installed 1GB of ram, a 2.5" 120GB HDD and a Bluetooth dongle.
Power is supplied via a 160w DC to DC power supply. The power supply unit also instructs the computer to shutdown and start up via the 2 pin power switch on the motherboard during ignition sequence. The form factor of the board is very small with a dimension of 12cm x 12cm. This makes it possible to install the whole computer inside the passenger side left front kick panel. The screen output is done via the video output on the motherboard to the factory Toyota Navigation unit. The picture quality is a lot to be desired, consider it is video out not VGA. It is acceptable for me as I only need to see if it is logging or not.
Loaded Windows XP with nlite treatment, now I can shrink the size of the install further, (down to about 400mb) as I have plan to move the 120GB HDD to a solid state drive upon successful testing.
The only thing I need to find now is a GPS logging program. I stumble across one in Google called GPS Track Maker. This program is excellent! Track logs can be logged in different setting like base on time, distance or full. When it is set to full you can tell it to automatically starts a new log once it reaches 500, 1000 or 2000 points! Very handy if you need export it into Vantage point.
I am still in the process of testing it out. It seems more reliable than the Magellan for sure. I will post back when I have some results.
