document updated 22 years ago, on Mar 21, 2004
At the moment, a near-minimum amount of work to get a B-box up and working
- Laptop Power
- cheap
- re-route 12V power from trunk to driver's seat (6 hours, have to remove both front seats)
- mount inverter under driver's seat (4 hours)
- lazy
- order the 12v laptop power
- semi-secure the power since I won't immediately use it anywhere else... would be nice to route the 12v wire under the dash
- Nervous System
- Spec out enclosure dimensions, find such an enclosure, cut any extra ventilation holes
- Make sure the enclosure will fit somewhere inside the dash without moving around too much
- Spec out connectors
- bus connectors to be eventually used (probably plain headers like SimmStick will be moving to soon)
- to the extent that external power connectors will be standardized, choose a connector/pinout for that
- Connections between external power and ECU signals into the separate boards inside, as well as regulated power back out to things like the GPS/phone/etc
- between the main power board and the main data board (since the main data board will eventually be completely reworked)
- Lay out initial PCB design (with power being on a completely separate board so it doesn't have to be resoldered when the main PIC board is redone)
- Figure out how boards will be physically secured
- Put all the above together
- Write the main PIC code (power control, spedo output)
- COTS Drawer (USB hub, audigy2, etc sitting in glove compartment)
- Build the GPS-USB connection, with power (3 hours)
- Connect the external USB wire back to the nervous system power control (2 hours)
- Route the cell/mainUSB/gps/etc wires around, make sure things are semi-pretty and well tied down (3 hours)
- Exposed mounting (GPS, phone)
- find a place to mount the GPS and phone where
- they have good views of the sky
- they have long enough cable to be picked up and used (eg. when the phone rings)
- they're mounted down well enough to not fly out the window, but not so much that they can't be quickly removed (eg. when phone rings)
- they're convenient to access by passenger/driver, but not in front of any airbags
- their mounts don't look butt-ugly when not in use
- Software
- make sure bare-minimum of odometer-synchronization can be accomplished
- correction factor (of course)
- continuous update of current distance, time, etc...
- ability to split, and adjust the split while current odometer continues to update
- if in Excel or some such, figure out how updates from spedo-PIC will get into the spreadsheet