Resource Catalog
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Inspirations and Literatures
[HideShow]Applications and Service Platforms for the Mobile User
A section of this article describes the WaveCar project that investigates the notion of elementary services in a highly dynamic environment. An idea is to equip the car with a system which will provide synchronization with the requisite client services through an Internet connection.
This site describes several products that allow you to access, start and secure your car with your fingerprint or with your eye ball pattern.
Boot Times for In-Car Computer Applications
This article discusses why car PC is a good idea and what some of the roadblocks are. It is easy to read, insightful and a good source for ideas.
Car Collision Avoidance System
The CCAS is a binocular intelligent video sensor that is mounted on a car and performs front monitoring of the road and vehicular traffic. It is based on methods of stereo-photogrammetry, digital image processing and Kalman filtering. A prototype of CCAS was designed and tested on the highway in real condition.
Car Whisperer Project Homepage
The carwhisperer project intends to educate manufacturers of carkits and other Bluetooth appliances a possible security threat caused by the use of standard passkeys.
Gentoo Weekly Newsletter Details in this project One handBook of Author
This newsletter describes a CarPC. It is based on a Via Epia small form factor mainboard, including features like a GPS receiver, Bluetooth and a high speed wireless network. A mobile phone connection (Verizon EVDO) is used for streaming video from a MythTV box at home so that the proud owner of the car can watch any movie while on the road ..
In-Vehicle Embedded System Development
This article describes new solutions for the development of in-vehicle embedded systems purposed by the French Embedded Electronic Architecture (AEE) cooperative research and development program. Specifically, the article discusses embedded component classes and a generic embedded architecture, as well as a declarative language.
Imagine driving around and having your car automatically sniff and record locations of wireless access points. Or how about having your entire music library right there with you while you drive across state? Wanna watch a movie while waiting for your grandma to get outa the hair salon? No problem. Browse the internet, get forecasts and stream directTV right to your car. But how can this be? One person made this a reality with his Linux based carPC. This is any geek’s dream car.
This is a short survey of Linux applications (almost all of them are Free Software) for navigation with laptops, notebooks, handhelds, PDAs and mobile phones. They are useful for bikers, car drivers, ships, and air planes. Additionally there are map conversion tools and links to freely available maps.
This project aims to create a GPS car navigator. This is something more than a typical "moving map" that you can do with Ozi, fmaps, Gnomad and others. The project aim is made route calculation, but not in a static way, as is doing by some web sites.
Linux-based computer systems are being placed on board V8 Supercars to provide visual information on crashes and relay the data to officials over a wireless network. The systems are central to a program undertaken by organizers of V8 Supercar racing in Australia to obtain more information about Supercar crashes, in the hopes of reducing the number of incidents at races.
This site describes a project started by one person. It is an example what a small team of contestant can do get Linux in a car and do interesting things..
Mobilized Software is an information resource and community focused on creating and deploying better mobile solutions. The site is produced by CMP in association with Intel Corporation, Microsoft and other mobile leaders.
The U.S. SpeechDat-Car Data Collection
The SpeechDat-Car is an ambitious effort to collect data from multiple languages in an in-car setting. This paper describes the U.S. data collection effort.
How to write a GPS Application 1 How to write a GPS Application 2
This excellent two-part article explains what makes GPS applications good enough for commercial in-car navigation and how the process of interpreting GPS data actually works. It also teaches some of the skills needed to write a commercial-grade GPS application that works with a majority of GPS devices in the industry today are covered.
Developing Applications for an Auto PC
This 1999 tutorial an overview on developing Auto PC applications and the platform for developing mobile device applications offered by Microsoft Windows CE.
Autonomous Vehicles
[HideShow]The unmanned autonomous vehicle is one step before the flying car. This new approach builds on the decades of research in Artificial Intelligence that is designed for a car from the ground up. This beta prototype is written in objective C, runs on BSD platforms and is released under GPL license.
Entertainment and Information
[HideShow]BeBoxMP can be used in your car or at home with your TV, in a HTPC. The program is simple to install and setup. The project also provides special tools for BMW Cars with IBUS (look at IbusComm for BeBoxMP integration). BeBoxMP runs on MS Windows and is released under GPL license.
CAJUN is a program that turns a computer into a center piece of car or home audio system. CAJUN supports multiple input/output devices, displays of varying sizes, keypad or infra-red control, FM cards, CD players, PEG audio files, GPS devices, shoutcast/icecast streams, and easy-to-use, documented API for writing new drivers. CAJUN is written in Perl. It is developed under RedHat Linux and is expected to run on all POSIX OS. It is released under GPL license.
This Linux based car MP3 distribution takes input from a numeric keyboard. LCD output is supported but optional. In addition to Linux, it runs on all POSIX OS and is released under GPL license.
ctrlMedia is a media center (audio, video, images, tv, ..) engineered for car embedded. It runs on Linux framebuffer/SDL Library using DirectFB, and uses external (free) software to reproduce contents. It runs on POSIX and Linux operating systems. The code is written in C and released under GPL license.
DFBCar is a GUI multimedia front end for xine-lib that uses directfb and is intended for use in a car. It provides simple widgets and control of xine-lib for the playback of MP3, Ogg, DVD, DivX, and other files, and plays or displays the contents of CD media with a single button press. It features a simple display of music with directories, and scrolling for long titles, making it possible to use large text on small LCD screens. It is written in C, runs on POSIX and Linux operating systems, and is released under GPL license.
The Empeg Car was a linux-based unit that transferred MP3 tracks from the user's computer to the player via USB, Ethernet, or a serial port connection.
Icecast (and Shoutcast) offer a way to broadcast audio streams. A core server accepts mp3- or ogg-encoded audio streams from encoders and broadcasts them to clients, who then listen to the audio via soundcard and speakers. Icecast can be setup on just one machine in your home/car. You can also set up multiple clients so that the stream goes to all the machines in your home. License information is missing.
IRMP3 is a multimedia audio jukebox for Linux. It can be easily integrate into home, car, and mobile environments. It is written in C and distributed under GPL license.
Knight Rider is a car mp3 player which supports interaction through text to speech synthesis and a keypad. It provides play list management, the ability to rip cd's, and other administrative tasks. It runs on POSIX OS and Linux, is written in C++ and Perl and is released under GPL license.
Linux powered PowerBook G3 car MP3 Player
Jon Bell is turning his Powebook G3 Lombard running Debian GNU/Linux into an in-car MP3 player with 20 x 4 USB CrystalFontz 634 screen to display the tracks and info. Bell offers at his collection of computer and peripheral modifications at http://stonewallcs.com/~jon/bellslabs/
The Orrick MP3 project consists of a pair of applications that can be used to build a low-cost MP3 player for the home or car. A perl server script runs on the server PC, and a PalmOS interface application runs on a linked Pilot or Visor. It is OS independent, written in C and Perl and released under GPL license.
PyCar is a media center for a car based PC( personal companion). It allows you to listen to music, watch movies, organize music files into play lists, etc. It is a Python based application, uses leading open source projects as a code base. It provides very extensive framework and can be customized by using external scripts, modules, plugins and renderers. Visual information can be represented in many ways: menu, buttons, small displays, virtual terminals and others. No modifications or recompilation is needed to run PyCar on Linux and Windows.
PyMedia is a Python module for wav, mp3, ogg, avi, divx, dvd, cdda etc files manipulations. It allows you to parse, de-multiplex, multiplex, decode and encode all supported formats. Also it features direct interface to a DVD-ROM drive allowing you to extract Audio disks, DVD and VCD movies. Its library is used extensive in PyCar application. PyMedia runs on Windows and Linux and is released under LGPL license.
DashPC technology will work in any late model vehicle. DashPC prototype vehicles feature Global Positioning and Navigation (GPS), Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs), and an OBDII on-board engine interface. Dashwerks technology includes such advanced features as Geocasting, AODV, VANETS, and V2V communication. Unlike other vehicle infotainment systems, the DashPC was designed to be simple to use in a vehicle environment, while simultaneously offering powerful expansion capability.
Environment, Interface, and Tools
[HideShow]carTunes is a collection of programs designed to communicate with Apple's iTunes (Windows) to allow better control in a car or other environment where the use of input devices, such as keyboard, mouse and monitor, is limited or unavailable.
FieldWorker site offers mobile application development and support tools.
FreeScan is a vehicle scan tool for connecting your personal computer up to a car's computer. It has been designed to interface with 8192 baud, GM based, ALDL vehicles. It runs on all MS 32-bit Windows, and it is released under GPL license.
TINIedCar is a project using an iButtion and TINI (tiny inter-net interface) hardware to enable any car to be started using an iButton and optional keypad through the web (turn on car and stereo, sound alarm, start heater, etc.). It also allows a car to be turned on/off using any 802.11b/g/WAP enabled device. It is written in Java and released under GPL.
wrX-Windows is a Java based application designed to provide an easy-to-use interface for a car computer. It provides the user with complete control over the functionality and the look-and-feel of the GUI. It is released under MPL 1.1
Kinematics and Monitors
[HideShow]0-100 is a GPS-aided car kinematics calculator. It computes forward and lateral accelerations of the vehicle, time to reach some speed and some distance. It works on PocketPC and Windows CE. It is written in C and released under GPL license.
GIS and Navigation
[HideShow]GpsDrive is a car (bike, ship, plane) navigation system. GpsDrive displays your position provided from your NMEA capable GPS receiver on a zoomable map. The map file is auto-selected depending of the position and preferred scale. Speech output is supported if the "festival" software is running. It is released under GPL license.
RoadMap is a program that supports car navigation: It displays a map of the streets, tracks the position provided by a NMEA-compliant GPS receiver, identifies the street matching the position and announces the name of the crossing street at the next intersection. A rudimentary trip feature allows RoadMap to display some basic navigation information (distance to the destination, direction, speed, etc.). Voice messages are generated that duplicate some of the screen information. RoadMap is written in C, runs on Linux and Unix, iPAQ and Zaurus. It is released under GPL license.
TomTom offers an all-in-one navigation device, TomTom Go. The device uses many open source software released under GPL license, including a compiler toolchain used to build all the software, the Linux kernel for ARM, with modifications by TomTom, BlueZ libraries and utilities, Other third party software under GPL license, and TomTom software under GPL license. This excellent resource page provides links to information and download sites.
Maintenance
[HideShow]Car Companion is a tool to track the maintenance that needs to be performed on the user’s car. It is written in Java and released under GPL.
Trip Planning and Fuel Economy
[HideShow]Car Mileage Calculator is designed for the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Linux PDA. It tracks and stores car gas mileage. It displays the gas mileage for each fill-up and for the lifetime of the car. It is written in C++ and released under GPL license.
This program allows the user's laptop to act as a trip computer displaying fuel economy, speed, and other information about a car which is connected through a hardware device to the parallel port. It is written in C, runs on POSIX OS, and released under GPL license.
The Palm Fuel Log is a program for recording gas purchases. It computes a series of statistics relating to fuel consumption for each vehicle, including fuel cost/mile, miles per gallon, liters per 100km, etc. It runs on PalmOS, and is released under GPL license.
Development Tools
[HideShow]Dynamic Probes is a Linux debugging facility. It offers a technique for debugging in both kernel and user space by allowing you to insert "probes" in running programs.
This manual describes the GNU profiler, gprof, and how you can use it to determine which parts of a program are taking most of the execution time
KGDB is a source level debugger for Linux kernel. It is used along with gdb to debug Linux kernel. Using KGDB, kernel developers can debug a kernel similar to application programs. KGDB is a kernel patch. It is available for i386, x86_64, ppc and s390 architectures.
gcov is a test coverage tool. You can use it with GNU CC to analyze your programs in order to make the programs more efficient. You can use gcov as a profiling tool.
LTT stands for Linux Trace Toolkit. It is a full-feature tracing system for the Linux kernel. It includes both the kernel components required for tracing and the user-level tools required to view the traces.
strace is a system call tracer, i.e. a debugging tool which prints out a trace of all the system calls made by a another process/program.
Embedded OS and Drivers
[HideShow]MontaVista offers a variety of cross-development and performance analysis tools along with embedded Linux, including a cross-development environment for consumer electronics devices.
eCos is an open source real-time operating system for embedded applications.
uClinux is a derivative of Linux 2.0 kernel for microcontrollers without Memory Management Units.
SilconPengiun.com offers links to a large number of embedded Linux distribution sites, including many sites for architecture and system specific Linux.
DriverGuide.com offers services to find and install drivers, as well as old and hard to find drivers.
SiliconPenguin.com:Software:Drivers
SiliconPenguin.com contains links to where one can find a variety of Linux drivers.
Open Source Foundries
[HideShow]SourceForge.net is the world's largest Open Source software development web site, hosting more than 100,000 projects and over 1,000,000 registered users with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and code. SourceForge.net has the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet, and hosts more Open Source development products than any other site or network worldwide. SourceForge.net provides a wide variety of services to projects it hosts, and to the Open Source community.
OpenFoundry is an easy-to-use platform developed and maintained by OSSF. Like other software foundries, it provides project management tools, including software repository, mailing list, web page, version control,and bug tracking/reporting. It also features both English and traditional/simplified Chinese interface.
Savannah is a central point for development, distribution and maintenance of Free Software that runs on free operating systems. Users can utilize the management tools including CVS, Download Area, Mailing List, etc.
Misc
[HideShow]Pydfb is a wrapper for DirectFB; so Python can use it.