Carputer

Here’s a great mobile blog. I'm currently in a defensive driving course listing to Mr. Taylor instruct us all on safe driving. Wow, people are scary! Anyway, I just spent the last two hours planning out a car mod that should be a lot of fun. Most people know about factory carputers. They annoyingly ding at us when our gas is running low, or flash our break lights when we "toe" the pedal. They can also show our remaining miles of gas, the outside temperature, or our direction of travel. Sure you can get these things in a new car, but what about that 97' Civic in your driveway? I decided to design a little carputer of my own to automate a few simple tasks in my vehicle.

The first thing I thought I’d conquer is small stereo volume adjustments depending on vehicle speed. When a car is at rest road noise is at a minimum and your stereos volume can be fairly low. However, when vehicle speed increases so does road noise, to combat the added noise you turn up the volume on your stereo, right? When you hit a stop-light your stereo is a touch too loud. A microcontroller could automate this very easily.

Why stop at stereo volume. With a microcontroller, I could automate windshield wipers and headlights to start. Everything I automate needs to be manually controllable and I need to be able to cut the automation when necessary. That’s the concept, time to move on to building the thing.