Long time no update here, if anyone's still even checking it!

I've been playing a little more with the car and AIMEE, and have decided to try to get dual monitors in there in time for the UK meet happening on 2/3 April.

I did my entire dash last year 2 weeks before the meet, and only just finished it, this time i'm probably going to be doing even more work...in even less time!


As for AIMEE, I've been very quiet with it, many things have been happening elsewhere in my life, both at work and at home.


My mum is getting married tomorrow, so there has been many things to get sorted! Once they go on their honey moon tomorrow night, I'll have the entire Easter weekend to hopefully work on the car and AIMEE.

Anyway, I'm off to bed...more later!

Damn thumbnails aren't working...just click on the links in the blog below!

No updates for a while...I've been reasonably busy, both with coding, work, and fabricating my screen into my dash, which I aimed to get completed for the UK meet which happened last weekend.

All was good on Saturday afternoon when the screen/dvd drive etc went in, but then once I'd loaded all my stuff into the car, it decided that it didn't want to work So, on Sunday morning, sitting in my car in the middle of a field, I was (again) pulling apart my dash, taking out the screen, as well as pulling apart Andrew's Lilliput and putting his Lilliput into the dash, so it looked at least a little better than it did before! (his screen dangling by the power cable somewhere at the bottom of my dash, as well as sitting at an angle because of the length of the power cable!!)

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The meet was awesome. Put faces to loads of names (then promptly forgot most of them! ) and had some really good chats! Big thanks go out to Stevie for the beer/food run on Saturday night, and Lisa for slaving over a hot portable stove to cook it for us! And of course, the bacon/sausages cooked in the morning, a great start to the day!!

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Saturday night also played host to what was quite possibly the first LAN party in a field. We had 6 laptops and 3 cars, all hooked up to the network, some were playing games, and all had internet access!
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All the installs were great, so many differences in look/layout! Congratulations to James (cloudy) for winning best boot, and best overall carpc (It was fixed - Ed), Steve (CdRsKuLL) for best dash, Phil (mini) for most originality, and Tom (mutilator) for most ghetto. I think it was that borrowed laptop, rat's nest of wires, and screen held on by cable ties that played some part in him winning that!

A couple of pics of everyone parked up during the day :)
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And here is a picture taken at the end of the day of (almost) everyone who attended :) Thanks to Cal for standing on the roof of Darren's van and taking it!
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Anyway, onto the thing you're really here for...updates on AIMEE!!

I have almost completed GPS support with Destinator 2, and have the basics of reading/using NMEA strings for those who don't have any GPS software, but have the hardware, so that they can at least use the speed/camera notification features. I've also within the last couple of days been within range of a wired network connection at home, so that I can install MapPoint to try to get some stuff done with that! I also have the Alturion and InfoMap Navigator SDKs sitting on my Laptop, ready for me to get round to trying to figure them out

I have also been working on communication with PhoneControl.NET, to allow you to fully control/use your phone from within AIMEE :) This is working about 80%, just a few tweaks etc to do, but it's looking and performing good!

I've also started work on DVD playback, and I shall be then returning to video playback, and tidying up some code that I worked on a few months ago!

Audio playback is almost complete, just a couple more little tweaks to do, same story with the playlist generation, just mainly speed tweaks on this


Web browsing from within AIMEE is working fine (and I'm actually using it to browse to this page to type this!) using either IE or Mozilla (depending on your preferences ), and I shall also be looking at pop/imap/smtp for email viewing/composing Whether that will be in an initial release, I'm not sure!

As for timescale...to be honest, I don't know. I'm going away on holiday for a week on Friday (up to Scarborough to see friends, and then to York for a few days) so there's going to be a lot of travelling to test out the system! It's also going to have quite a good workout...my GF will be using it!! If it can survive her pressing everything, then it's going to be pretty good!!

A long time with no updates!

We've been busy fixing little bugs and putting in little features, which while may seem small (to us anyway in the grand scheme of things), should make the program just that little better for you :)

I've been using a week-old build in my car every day, and i've not experienced any problems yet, so things are looking good :)

There are still a few little things that require fixing/looking at, and a few more things to add/test!

Oh crap.

I've just tried to update the version of the blog used here, and it decided to wipe out all of the blog posts! How nice! So i've been trawling through my cache to look for it, which I managed to do (but I haven't found Andrew's) and have re-posted it here, which is why everything now has time-stamps over the past few minutes, and the comments are gone!

Hopefully i'll not do that again! ;) It's not too good on the old ticker ;)

The skinning is going very nicely, there are some really great designs being made, and I've been using Spaghetti's skin over the past few days in the car, and the day/night skins look awesome, and are really clear, can't find any fault with them yet! ;)

I've also got myself an old T68i phone from Ebay, which I've now got hooked up to the carputer via BT, and am using the awesome PhoneControl.NET to interface with the phone. It's great to get into the car and not worry about taking the phone out of my pocket, putting it somewhere where it won't roll around, and having to pull over any time it rings (as it's now illegal to hold a phone while driving in the UK) and just speak using the PC as a headset :)

Anyway, onto some more work! ;)

The response to the Teaser video has been tremendous! Over 400 downloads of the video in less than a day!

I've also put up a "call to arms" for some skins on the MP3Car forums, anyone who is graphicsy, get in touch!

I've also made lots more progress to the GPS/camera etc code since my last update regarding it, it's now working brilliantly, all I need now is to code in the function to add a new camera, and we'll be away in that respect :)

Speaking of which, I think I'm going to start on that now! Adios!

We've been busy since the last update!

A few more bugs fixed, a few more features added, and we've done a sneak preview video too, just to whet the appetite ;)

Got the wheels on Saturday morning and by 1pm they were fitted!




Tested out the speed camera code while I was out and about over the weekend, and I had some code that was 90 degrees out, so wasn't warning you of the camera properly...was simple enough to fix so is all ok now!

Going to pick up my wheels tomorrow

Of course, what better time to test out Destinator and AIMEE, along with the start of the speed camera notification aspect of things.

Not much coding will get done this weekend, as Andrew is at Ultimate Street Car at Santa Pod, and I'm fiddling with my Carisma tomorrow, going to a mate's tomorrow night to meet up with loads of people from school, and then on Sunday morning I'm trailering my Anglia from my nan's back garden to my dad's back garden so he can start to do some work/welding on that!

Normal services should be resumed again by Monday!

Andrew has been finding minor bugs/issues left and right, which is a good thing, as he's testing out the stuff I've coded, in a way I wouldn't think of trying it, so more and more issues are being solved, which is making AIMEE more and more stable all the time.

I've started work now on GPS, and also the basics of the speed camera notification, which should be pretty comprehensive once it's done!