Xero_Tolerance
20+ Year Contributor
- 145
- 0
- Sep 27, 2002
-
Austin,
Texas
If you're planning on flaming me or telling me this won't work then you can stop reading now... I'm not here for pessimistic (sp?) people's opinions on things, without optimistics, or dreamers, like me then nothing new would ever be done, now would it?
I had an inspiration recently after putting a PC in my car to use it to its full capacity. So I started to think about all the things a PC can do in a car and came up with a few that I think would be awesome to encorporate.
My first idea has to do with climate control. The 1g DSM I'll be working with has pretty ugly looking knobs to turn the heat up, the fan speed and change whether air should come from the inside or out, recirc thing. So my idea is this. Use my computer, which will have a thermometer attatched to it in order to set the temperature digitally. I'll use servos that will hook into the fan speed thing and the temperature thing in order to control their use through my computer. The servos will hook up to the computer obviously and I'll write a program that controls their movement in order to set the temperature my checking the desired temperature, which you'll be able to set through the use of the touchscreen, like digital cars today, and then the compture will turn on the fan using the servo and turn the temperature all the way to hot or all the way to cold. That way when the temperature reaches the desired level it will turn the fan off and you'll be good to go. Since it would be hard to keep the temp at the exact level all the time, would be a lot of turning on and off the fan, it'll have a buffer zone of like 2-3 degrees or something else you can set. So when the temp falls or climbs above the 2-3 degrees the fan will turn back on and the car will be at the right temp again.
Of course it'll be kind of hard to get the servos behind the dash so I'm going to make a completely custom fiberglass dash which will hopefully seat another 7" lilliput touchscreen LCD that'll hook up to my pc using dual monitor support, i'm not sure how dual touchscreen support works, but worst case scenario I can use that touchscreen I have in there now to control everything.
With this hook up I'll also be able to have light sensors which will allow me to enable auto-lighting with the help of servos, so when the light value becomes too low it'll turn the lights on... I'll also be able to hook my mirrors up to little joysticks, they're kind of broken now, so when I use each respective joystick it'll move the mirror accordingly.
If I really get all this stuff working and find some extra cash I'd really like to put a little camera in the back of the car somewhere so you can see what's behind you, if money permits then a night vision camera would be dope. Also I want to put little infrared sensors on the back, two sides and front of the car which will beep or make some kind of noise when you're car gets a certain distance away from another car, or possibly the curb, or any obstruction really.
I want to get ecu+ or dsmlink and figure out how to get those values that are read in by those programs and use them for my program so I can have my program know the speed, rpm, fuel maps, all that other fun stuff which would allow me to let me know my current mileage, how much I'd have left on a tank, acceleration, and whatever else I can think of.
I'm going to put GPS in the car... that's pretty self-explanitory.
The computer will eventually sit where the center console is right now, like not the first part where the shifter is but that second part of the console behind it and I'll customize that using fiberglass as well. The whole interior is going to be black and dark gray, if not completely black. All the lights will be blue, like the reverse indiglo blue ones they sell on ebay, I think those look pretty nice. I won't really need any gaugues since all the info will be on my computer but I'll probably have a boost gauge and egt and a/f ratio mounted above the computer with an avc-r maybe, depending on if I can use the computer to set boost... Not sure if they have anything out right now that uses ecu+ or dsmlink to do that with.
I think that's pretty much everything I could think of... Like I said, if you want to flame me then don't waste your time typing, I've thought about this and I'm pretty determined to go through with it. But, if you have questions about how I plan on doing something, like any obstacle questions I'd be happy to try and answer any of those since I do need to think of all the things that'll get in the way of my plan. Well, let me know what you think of my project plan.
I had an inspiration recently after putting a PC in my car to use it to its full capacity. So I started to think about all the things a PC can do in a car and came up with a few that I think would be awesome to encorporate.
My first idea has to do with climate control. The 1g DSM I'll be working with has pretty ugly looking knobs to turn the heat up, the fan speed and change whether air should come from the inside or out, recirc thing. So my idea is this. Use my computer, which will have a thermometer attatched to it in order to set the temperature digitally. I'll use servos that will hook into the fan speed thing and the temperature thing in order to control their use through my computer. The servos will hook up to the computer obviously and I'll write a program that controls their movement in order to set the temperature my checking the desired temperature, which you'll be able to set through the use of the touchscreen, like digital cars today, and then the compture will turn on the fan using the servo and turn the temperature all the way to hot or all the way to cold. That way when the temperature reaches the desired level it will turn the fan off and you'll be good to go. Since it would be hard to keep the temp at the exact level all the time, would be a lot of turning on and off the fan, it'll have a buffer zone of like 2-3 degrees or something else you can set. So when the temp falls or climbs above the 2-3 degrees the fan will turn back on and the car will be at the right temp again.
Of course it'll be kind of hard to get the servos behind the dash so I'm going to make a completely custom fiberglass dash which will hopefully seat another 7" lilliput touchscreen LCD that'll hook up to my pc using dual monitor support, i'm not sure how dual touchscreen support works, but worst case scenario I can use that touchscreen I have in there now to control everything.
With this hook up I'll also be able to have light sensors which will allow me to enable auto-lighting with the help of servos, so when the light value becomes too low it'll turn the lights on... I'll also be able to hook my mirrors up to little joysticks, they're kind of broken now, so when I use each respective joystick it'll move the mirror accordingly.
If I really get all this stuff working and find some extra cash I'd really like to put a little camera in the back of the car somewhere so you can see what's behind you, if money permits then a night vision camera would be dope. Also I want to put little infrared sensors on the back, two sides and front of the car which will beep or make some kind of noise when you're car gets a certain distance away from another car, or possibly the curb, or any obstruction really.
I want to get ecu+ or dsmlink and figure out how to get those values that are read in by those programs and use them for my program so I can have my program know the speed, rpm, fuel maps, all that other fun stuff which would allow me to let me know my current mileage, how much I'd have left on a tank, acceleration, and whatever else I can think of.
I'm going to put GPS in the car... that's pretty self-explanitory.
The computer will eventually sit where the center console is right now, like not the first part where the shifter is but that second part of the console behind it and I'll customize that using fiberglass as well. The whole interior is going to be black and dark gray, if not completely black. All the lights will be blue, like the reverse indiglo blue ones they sell on ebay, I think those look pretty nice. I won't really need any gaugues since all the info will be on my computer but I'll probably have a boost gauge and egt and a/f ratio mounted above the computer with an avc-r maybe, depending on if I can use the computer to set boost... Not sure if they have anything out right now that uses ecu+ or dsmlink to do that with.
I think that's pretty much everything I could think of... Like I said, if you want to flame me then don't waste your time typing, I've thought about this and I'm pretty determined to go through with it. But, if you have questions about how I plan on doing something, like any obstacle questions I'd be happy to try and answer any of those since I do need to think of all the things that'll get in the way of my plan. Well, let me know what you think of my project plan.
