CarPC for my Triton

When I took a delivery of my Triton 2.5DID, one thing that cross my mind was to have a CarPC installed. It was back in 2007 but too many things happening and I didn't do anything until few weeks back when I've got nothing to play around with.

Took me months to decide what I wanted for my CarPC. I just don't want to have it half done .. so, a week ago, I decided to get a complete unit from one vendor. One thing, this CarPC stuff are mainly done in US and Europe, there are few here in Malaysia and many of them either ordered their unit from US or using mini ITX casing with inverter. One that I worried when deciding either to go for Dell Zino or Acer Revo is the power unit. There is only one solution for that which is getting a carnetix power supply, this has the auto powerup/shutdown and whole lot more. But I decided to go for a purpose-built CarPC from mo-co-so.com, from ebay of all places!!

The mo-co-so unit that I bought has Zotac Ionitx-F-E (though in the website and ebay listing, they said it comes with Ionitx-D-E). It has 2GB RAM, 250GB notebook HD, bluetooth and that about the extras coming with the unit (other than the stock Zotac motherboard that it). Here are the pics:

I decided to go for the Liliput EBY701 based on the input from another guy who've his carpc up and running in his triton too.. his link can be found here.

On the audio, my current Kenwood KDC-MP4033S has CD-changer interface which with some specialised cable, it could also turn the AUX-Input. Searching the net led me to CAC1X and for those who doesn't want to spend money and can source an 13-pin DIN male, then, there is easy way .. what you need to do is to have a 10k resistor between pin 3 & 9, pin 6 is common ground and pin 8 & 12 go to left and right into a stereo plug.

Anyway, what is running on this carpc at the moment are: Centrafuse 3.1 running on Win XP SP3, Garmin Mobile PC with malfreemaps. I've a leftover bluetooth/USB GPS (iBlue 747) from my abandoned tracking project and this works well with GPSGate. I need to get AGWTracker working so I could connect the gps input to my radio and out to the APRS world. This is not a priority at the moment. I'm also waiting for my OBDII interface ordered from ebay to arrive.

Video I made:




And here some of the pics during the installation:

 

 

 

WZR-HP-G300NH, OpenWRT & Huawei E160E

Finally, the latest release of OpenWRT 10.03 (codenamed BackFire) is out and it supports the WZR-HP-G300NH. Didn't take long until your truly take a plunge and flash his router with this latest firmware. Actually, the firmware supported the router since it's development release but since I'm not really into testing beta stuff, I've been patiently waiting for it to be available.. officially that it.

What the first thing I tried to do .. ? You guess it right, if you've followed my blog before .. trying to get APRS4R running on it but excitement overcomes the most basic thing I should do .. yes, RTFM .. APRS4R doesn't have support for other than mipsel and x86. So, what should I do with this mega router (64MB RAM with over 65% left after all the basic stuff loaded and over 32MB flash with over 90% empty)? One thing for sure, from my last week experience, where screamyx was so damn slow due to some international link was brought down for maintenance .. yes, a backup 3G broadband and I want this to be available without tinkering with my network setup everytime this thing happens. So, after thinking for few days .. and saw somebody wanted to let go his 3G USB dongle (Huawei E160E) for RM120, didn't think that long and my wallet had flattened a bit..

What do I need to get this E160E running? Tried it many times, loading kmod-usb-ohci and kmod-usb-uhci alongside the requirement to get USB working on Linux but no go.. just to realise that this router has USB2 .. so .. added kmod-usb2 got it going.. the E160E was recognised only after I added the following line into /etc/modules.d/60-usb-serial:


usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x1003 maxSize=4096

What else needed, as per the documentation, comgt is required too, this has script to do the call-out for the 3G.

And for anyone wanted to do the same thing, the following guide is really helpful (at least for me and many others) in getting things going:

http://josefsson.org/openwrt/dongle.html