Thinking Aloud: Power Issues for a Raspberry Pi as a Car Computer

We could switch from a Raspberry Pi to an oDroid or another sort of low-power computer-on-a-board. My Pi has a task right now, so if I was to go forward with this, I'll have to get something new anyway, but for sake of this discussion, we'll assume this is it.

I own a USB GPS unit. I own a OBDII-to-USB unit. I own a small VGA monitor for Pi use. A thing that would be useful is a thing that does some networking over the cellphone network, but if it just dumps to my home network when I get home, that'd be good enough.

Here's a niggly bit or me: I start the vehicle and the Pi gets power. I stop the vehicle and the power cuts, leading the computer shutting down suddenly. This is not a happy thing with computers. In fact, I think I can say they hate that, and eventually, the SD card will say enough with this and not boot.

So, the proper solution is to have a power circuit with a battery, that allows it to boot when the car starts and sends the shutdown signal when it stops, but providing enough juice in the battery for the Pi to shut down nicely.

Google told me how to trigger the shutdown when wanted. Just need to figure out how to know what's going on with power.

You Don't Want Another Computer! On Dash-Top PCs, Set-Top PCs and Pocket Supercomputers

A decade ago, I started to get obsessed with the idea of hooking a computer to my car. I thought about storing and displaying diagnostic and status information, about storing music and podcasts, about having it handle navigation and all sorts of stuff. I hit the point where I considered the trade-off between storage media — solid state would be more survivable, but I could get literally hundreds of much bigger spinning hard drives for the cost of an SSD — and decided to keep it a mental exercise.

I'm certainly not the only one who considered putting computers in cars. And, eventually it became easy, because the iPhone came around, phones all had data and GPS, so the media and navigation parts of the equation were solved, and with Bluetooth and even 1/8" jacks, cars became stereos with four wheels. The only parts remaining are diagnostics and auto behavior modification. You can get the Garmin ecoRoute for $100 or a Bluetooth-talking ELM327 OBDII dongle for much less, plus many free apps for your phone. To my knowledge, chipping isn't dynamic yet — you can't remap your engine control unit's behavior on-the-fly — but I'm sure it's coming. Andy Greenberg wrote in Forbes about all the things two security researchers could do to pwn a Toyota Prius, and they were looking at capabilities, not attack vectors.

Point I'm trying to make is, for all my dreaming of putting a car into my computer, I now have one every time I sit down in my car, and even better, it comes back out every time I get out, so I don't have to worry about it when I go to the office, and it isn't locked in there if I have an accident. Things like Ford's Sync work best when they realize they're just an interface between your phone and your car.

(I now have an OBDII-to-USB cable and a Raspberry Pi, so I will have a computer in my car, but I'm going to explore the API and try to do more of the controlling-the-car things than a phone app would do. Certainly I'll still listen to podcasts while driving with my phone, not my Pi. I'll be sure to blog about it later.)

But I am not here to talk about car PCs.

I'm here to talk about home theater PCs.

I have one. It's an old HP that was handed down to me because it had connection issues I have never been able to replicate. The CMOS battery had died and corroded, too. Now it runs Windows 8.1 — will the indignities never end? — and I have it in my bedroom connected to the VGA port of my TV. I don't often use it, because when I start throwing pixels through the video card, the fan starts up and I have to turn it up to hear anything. I use it when I want to play with Windows 8, so not a lot.

When I want to consume media these days, I pull out my phone or tablet and point it at the Chromecast. More and more apps are coming — Google's opened the ChromeCast API — so the sweet spot between "essentially a wireless HDMI cable" and "smart thing that holds on to your credentials and streams you stuff" is being filled with more and more things.

I have a BluRay player. It comes with a wired ethernet jack in the back, and I have on occasion had it set up so I could use the networking portions, but when you're searching for YouTube videos or trying to type in passwords, the remote is a poor interface. Updates to YouTube's TV interface and others now bring up a URL you browse to that sets up the connection between your box and your account, but that's an update nobody ever pushed to my BluRay player; basically, once they make the next device, they don't care about the old one, so nothing cool is ever going to come back to my several-year-old player. This is what I fear is the fate of proprietary smart TV interfaces: the next cool thing in streaming apps will come next year, while I'll hold on to any TV I buy for several years, which means I'd have an ugly interface I hate for a decade after the company doesn't care.

We just got a Roku; I haven't even used it yet, and have only touched the remote once. It makes sense for the living room TV, which is old enough that it doesn't have an HDMI port. There is a Roku app for Android, so I'm sure I'll use it in a similar way to how I use the ChromeCast.

I saw a presentation recently that showed the older Google TV interface next to the Apple TV remote, arguing that every button in the full-keyboard-rethought-as-an-XBox-controller is a delayed design decision, and that the sparseness of the Apple TV is a selling point; I haven't used the Apple ecosystem, and I understand it's really slick, but trying to handle deep, full and varied content through such a limited interface. (Sophie Wong has a fuller discussion with photos of both remotes in a blog post.) The Roku's remote adds to that by having a hardware button to go directly to Blockbuster's app; Blockbuster is defunct and now there's a button always pointing to a dead thing. Software remotes like the Roku app should be easily updated to the sweet spot of usability.

When some people I know have tried the ChromeCast, they've objected, because they want a computer they control, not a second screen for their phone. I recognize that thinking, because really, that's what I was looking for in a car PC, before I realized that it isn't what I really want. Nothing built-in, as little smarts as I need to talk to it, and as much controllable from my phone as possible.

Do you have an argument for set-top boxes I haven't talked through? The only one I can think of is that content providers sometimes allow their content to be viewed in one forum and not others; the video to the left of Marina Shifrin telling her boss she quits through the art of interpretative dance is one of many that is cleared to be shown through TV only. As the use of phones for connectivity dwarfs the use of desktops and laptops, I'm sure that'll fall. If there's another argument, I'm game to engage it.

Making a CarPuter to step into the New Car

It's been a while since I've written on car computing — over two years, it seems — but that doesn't mean I've stopped thinking about it. The top reasons I would've wanted one in years past would've been for Entertainment and Communication, and I think everyone would agree that today, it's far better to just carry a smartphone than to embed one into your car. And, seeing how smartphones are changing so much so fast, doing more than adding the ability to interface with Bluetooth and/or USB to your vehicle seems silly, at least in short-term.

Navigation doesn't fare too much better, so although it's a toss-up whether dedicated units like Garmin and TomTom are better than smartphone navigation like Google Maps, both are accepted as better (more current maps, better interfaces) than in-dash choices.



I think the use that is least considered is recording. Dash cams are common in Russia because they're used for legal protection, but have given YouTube a great catalog of amazing video. I think there's reason beyond "Hold my beer and watch this" for Americans to have dash cams, and I do want one.

But, ultimately, I think the best reason to get into "Carputers" is Diagnostics, getting into the data that is available from your car's OBDII port. The obvious way is to use an OBDII-to-Bluetooth adapter like the ELM327 or Garmin EcoRoute, but it strikes me that there are enough security vectors in to the New Car that adding more is not a wise route. So, I'm thinking that the Raspberry Pi and an OBDII USB cable might be the better way to handle it, except I'm not sure how to export the data, and while it would be useful to keep track while driving, ultimately, off-the-road analysis is where the usefulness of the process comes in.

I'm thinking that a Raspberry Pi, a cable, a small monitor with composite video and maybe a few other things could be easily turned into a car-monitoring system, and I could pretty easily set something up to only sync with my home network when it's close. I'm not sure whether that's more cost-effective than just getting an ELM327 and an ELM327 app from the Play Store, but I think I'd end up learning more that way.

Anyway, I'm still undecided on the phone/Pi issue, but I think this is something I need to do.

Podcasts and Synergy

Image from vanRijn

I've put Google Listen on my phone, listening to podcasts while I drive. One of them is Spectrum from the IEEE, and the one that came on my player was about the Kinect. I have never used the Kinect, as I'm not much of a gamer. Sometimes I'll sit down and play the Wii with the boys, but I have used it more as a Netflix player. So, I'll never use it as intended.

But the interview is not about intention. It is about capability. The Kinect is able to multiple identify people, both by voice and by vision, in noisy, chaotic environments. People are already starting to hack the Kinect to allow Minority Report interfaces and the like.

The second thing I heard was on Hacker Public Radio, which I started to get into after Indiana LinuxFest. The podcast itself is a pre-interview discussion between KDE spokesman Aaron Seigo and Jonathan Nadeau of Frostbite Systems.

Accessability questions have been floating in my head recently. There's lots of buzz about Section 508 in the circles I float through, enough so I've attended two compliance talks in 2011, and my wife has been trying to be a productive person while having severe pain in her right elbow and forearm that keep her from being able to type. She's been playing with speech recognition software, finally trying the Windows 7 native setup that came with her new laptop.

But honestly, when thinking about accessability, I wasn't really thinking about accessibility. I think that there's research at the end of the line for this train of thought that will serve to help accessibility, but it isn't foremost in my head here.

I was driving. I was thinking about cars.

As I think I've mentioned, I've been looking at some travel applications. I tend to have either Listen or a media player of one sort or another playing when I drive, rather than CDs or even worse, radio. (I have only one objection to Amazon Cloud Player, which is that it wants to run only on WiFi, and by and large, I want to use my phone as a media player when I'm mobile, away from WiFi, but maybe the coming of 4G or the next software fix from Sprint will fix that.) I have a TomTom GPS showing my location and speed and I sometimes use Sprint or Google for directions, too. Also, I've been looking into Vlingo, which gives a voice interface to phones. I noticed a bug, hopefully fixed soon, where I hit the Talk Now button while listening to a podcast, and told it to call my wife. Normally, when you tell it to call, it shuts up the media player, Listen included, but here it didn't. So, I'm trying to pause the player and/or mute the player, while on the Interstate.

I know. I know. The point of the exercise is to keep from having this sort of attention-sucking frustration from occurring while I'm driving, because I don't want to hurt myself, my stuff, or other people and their stuff, pretty much in that order. Haven't been too keen of Vlingo since. It's cool enough, but you shouldn't have to press a button while driving to say "I wanna talk now".

And I don't think the Vlingo is alone. Watch just a few high-end car reviews on Top Gear and you'll know that the UIs for even fancy cars are crap.

Ultimately, to do a driving interface right, you have to assume that there will be no vision at all. Most of the things you do while driving (besides avoiding obstacles and other drivers) occur without vision: you use your sense of touch to feel the vibration and you hear the engine to know when to shift. You see the red Check Engine light but you take it in when it starts to sound or feel funny. You can even get away with not often checking the speedometer by staying at a similar speed to your fellow drivers. If you're going to do much computing while driving, it'll have to be via voice. And once that shows up in high-end vehicles, that browser is going to rival Firefox and Chrome and IE at the top of the browser food chain.

(As a pure aside, I think Opera will go there. I don't like Opera and haven't for over a decade, but I know I'm biased on the subject, but it seems like a place that Opera would go, more than anyone else.)

But as we needed the keyboard and then the mouse to get the WIMP interface for computers into the office and the home, we need to rock a voice interface to get the computer into the car. Which is where the Kinect comes in. I kinda think that the car will be a big docking station for future computers, as seat settings and address books and the like are highly personal but a great deal of hardware is there for anyone who sits down. Kinect-based technology would be necessary to distinguish between the driver, the passenger in the front seat who talks with his hands and the loud kids in the back seat. The recognition between conversations between user and computer and conversations between driver and passengers is crucial, and one I think that Microsoft Research and Kinect are closest.

There's going to be a small LED screen for the backup camera in the New Car's rear-view mirror (and some cars of today already have it) and a Kinect as well. Of this I am sure.

Pondering the Future, the Shock of the New, and Defining The Terms

I think I have to start with The New X here. I've gone on about The New Telephone and The New Television without really defining my conception, my mindset. I think it's obvious what I mean with those, but when I hit the next topic on my mind, you get a certain Bob Barker connotation.

Image by Wayne Silver
THE NEW CAR!

I have a concept in my mind of life between 1955 and 1985 (only about half of which I lived through) where the Old Telephone and Television live. The Old Television, for example, consists of complete boxes, with the beginnings of plug-ins from VCRs and Atari game machines. The New Television, still being designed and tested, will involve multiple sources, time-shifting, and modularization such that the screen is but a monitor, one of many.

But TV is fundamentally information. As long as you can see it and hear it, who cares whether it comes from the air, a coax cable or a Cat5e jack? The New Car is different. It is first and foremost a mechanical thing, and thus the issues involved are different.

A person from 1970 stepping into today wouldn't understand cell phones and would be befuddled by the collection of remotes on the TV, but I am very certain she could get into a 2010 car, start it, and drive it around. "Three on the Tree" isn't nearly as popular as it used to be, but the gas pedal, brake pedal, speedometer, turn signals, AC, rear-view mirror would all be about where she'd expect them to be and would behave about how she'd expect them to behave. There would be a few hiccups possible — electric motors and hybrids, OBDII and continuously variable transmissions are three things that come to mind — but they don't particularly affect the driving experience too much. The mechanics of automobiles have been abstracted away from the act of driving, and that's a good thing.

What is changing is the information-related aspects of driving, as fast and as good as the car companies can do it. As the driver of a car that was the cheapest new car we could find, much of what I know is from driving rentals when my car is in the shop, and from watching Top Gear. I see in-dash navigation, but you don't really want to be looking down at the dash too much when driving, and an in-dash system won't have the quick update times of navigating with your phone. Car audio systems have connecting to your iPod and iPhone down just as Android is beginning to dominate the market.

For the car market, electronics is a trailing concern. You want it to be so, clearly, because making the car faster, safer and more economical are the leading concerns. But it makes the choices dated. I saw a video from CNet's Car Tech section where the reviewer talks about the Toyota Camry, mentioning the 6-disc CD player (in the last days of optical media?) and optional dual DVD players in the back seat for too much money, which he suggests you skip and get iPads instead.

I told a friend a few months ago that I wanted to put a computer in a car. He asked "What would you do with that?" The thing that I mentioned is combining OBDII data with GPS so I can connect what I was doing and where I was doing it to what the engine was doing. I'm not a mechanic, so I don't really know what I'd do with that information. That information becomes really usable when you breach the firewall and start connecting to engine, transmission and brake electronics. Currently, you can get aftermarket chips to change the behavior of your engine and such, but that's warranty-voiding stuff, and also, tight inner-loop microprocessor kind of work. It won't wait until the OS pages, queries a database and returns a proper response.

Plus, of course, the standard interface vectors for electronics elsewhere are attention-sucking accident-causing crap for autos.

So, I forsee the creation of The New Car, joining long-term reliable mechanics with high-turnover electronics, as a long-term process that will cause grumbling for a long long time.