Welcome to project::GIGACAR
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Introduction

OK, this is just a simple page to document what I for fun call project::gigacar, which is basically just the joy of playing around with mobile Internet and other technologies in a car. See the history section for a more complete description of what I did in the past. The HTML is neither validated nor very elegant, but it should display OK on virtually every browser including lynx and various mobile devices browsers.

Current status

So how far am I today? Here's a short listing of my current hardware used in the "gigacar".
  • The car: A BMW 850Ci. Not that it matters, in fact I really had much fun in my old VW Passat, and when ordering the domain 7 years ago I had that car in mind with an very ironic smile on my face. But this BMW has TWO 65Ah on board batteries and 300W power available at the cigar lighter, very useful. And: I have this car over 5 years now and I just love it. The V12 simply is BMW's finest engine, and the 850 the most timeless car ever built around it. And in times of WaveLAN not all people have to fit in one car :)
  • The power: using a 220W power inverter generating ugly 220V out of the car's 12V I can power as many notebooks and mobile phones as I need to. This isn't the best solution but it works really OK for me.
  • The PCs: For a long time I was using two P90 notebooks as on-board servers. One to connect the mobile phone to and one for the GPS. Today I also have an IBM T41 and a 4 port PCMCIA RS232 card to connect Phones, GPS Receiver and so on... Besides this I'll usually have one or more notebooks on board for the passengers :> The Nokia 9500 also gives a very nice WLAN client.
  • The Network: using a Lucent Wavepoint II basestation connected over a crosscable to one notebook a wireless network is provided. Using one or two cards in the basestation and an Yagi as well as an omni antenna the network is extended to two other cars driving in the convoy :>
  • The Phones: She would say I have enough :) There's the complete series of Nokia 9xxxx Communicators up to the 9500 (6 altogether), as well as an GPRS capable S45 and 7650 and a Vodafone UMTS Card. The 9000s connect well using RS232 for sending and receiving SMS as well as for normal CSD connections. The main Internet uplink today is the UMTS in a time billing plan and the 7650 for GPRS and volume based billing.
  • The GPS: for GPS I either use a Magellan 315 or Garmin eTrex providing NMEA data over RS232, or the Fortuna GPSMart BT offering USB and bluetooth. The 315 is usually mounted on my dashboard and will be used anyway, if not for the network then in connection with my Nokia 9110 to warn me at dangerous traffic spots.
  • DECT: Chatting is fun, but sometimes a phone call is faster. For that purpose I usually have a DECT basestation running in one car, so people in other cars can book their handsets in and make internal car-to-car DECT calls. Very funny and works surprisingly well...
OK, a quite nice list of technical equipment, but what for? Here's a list of features I have so far evaluated and implemented:
  • Internet: of course, the main feature. In the past I often used HSCSD dial-up in the D2/Vodafone network directly to my Bintec Brick XL on which I have reserved 2 B-channels exclusively for this project, for GPRS I'll use Viag Interkom. Since the UMTS start on Cebit 2004 I also have the Vodafone Mobile connect Card UMTS, proving download speeds up to 30KByte/sec. Masquerading is usually done for the whole network, a squid proxy together with an Internet junkbuster makes surfing possible at acceptable speed, and a local ircd enables cross-car chatting over the wireless network as well as an connection to the outside world. Sometimes even a dhcpd is running to give easy access for drive-by hackers :>>
  • Navigation: Using the gpsdrive software for Linux we hopefully always know where we are :> It provides a moving map and on-demand map download from the Internet, I also once integrated the D2 passo map of traffic jams but that service stopped. It doesn't have street-level navigation so far but by pre-downloading the maps of the target area and drawing the right way into it using GIMP usually is enough :)
  • Speed-Camera warning: using a database of all stationary Speed cameras ("Radar-traps" but they don't use radar on stationary ones so these can't be detected using a normal radar detector) and the GPS a warning sound is played to remind the driver of the current speed-limit when one of these expensive photo-locations is near :> I have also implemented this kind of speed-camera warning on the Nokia 9000/9110 communicator, see here, which is able to access the car's speaker over the Nokia hands-free kit and therefore not overhearable :>
  • Remote Tracking: using gpsdrive's friendsd the position of the gigacar can be made visible to others (running the gpsdrive software) on the Internet in real time. I usually don't have this running but it can be fun.
  • MP3 PlaybackOf course there are a few megs of MP3s on the notebooks hard-disk, running mpg123 in a screen it's easily possible to wirelessly control the playback from any notebook in the car. Using icecast it's even possible to broadcast music to other cars in a convoy over WLAN :)