First Test Drive

Last weekend i went up to Carnegie Mellon University with my cousin to visit some friends.  I finally got the computer in the car and having a passenger for the long trip was great to help experiment with the system.

Overall i'm very happy with how well the system worked for my first attempt at getting it to work.  The GPS software, Copilot Live! worked very well.  It does a great job recalculating new directions if you miss a certain road.

List of improvements which need to be made after initial test drive to Carnegie Mellon Univerity:

• Provide a cleaner power supply.  I suspect that the inverter is creating too much noise.  For one the sound quality is kind of sucky and also the range on my wireless keyboard is much worse once i started running the computer off the alternator instead of having it running off an AC source.
• System doesn't survive cranking.  The system has to be turned on once the car has been started.  During cranking the voltage drops and i think what is happening is the inverter can't supply enough power for the computer at this time so it goes into a overload protection mode which requires that it be restarted.  Possible solutions is just buying an Opus powersupply or just making a regulator circuit which is capable of providing 12V over a range of input voltages.
• Microphone has way too much noise on it.  This could be cause of the noise from the alternator but may also be because the wire is running too close to the power lines for the amp/computer.  So i need to debug this and perhaps reroute it.
• On the way back to carnegie mellon heat became an issue.  The trunk was packaged with stuff and there wasn't enough ventilation and the system became unstable and crashed :(
• Control software has a few bugs that need to be addressed
• Perhaps get a higher resolution screen.
• Have the GPS software temporarily mute the music when it's giving directions.