Iphones and Cars

There’s quite a bit that you can do with your iphone and car nowadays, you can remote start and lock them via your iphone and even steer it remotely.

Remote Drive

The Spirit of Berlin team has developed an iPhone app to remotely control a minivan, not quite “Tomorrow Never Dies“, but its getting there.

They didn’t have to do much to the vehicle to get this working because the platform was developed for the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge. The iPhone connects with the driving circuitry via WiFi and offers a gas button, a brake button, and a steering button to enable the accelerometer for turning. The front camera video is transmitted to the iPhone in real-time. Not available from Halfords just yet though.

Taken from http://hackaday.com/…

Remote Lock and start

There is an app that is available in US stores at the moment which connects to a Viper SmartStart hardware module installed in your car, and it allows you to control five basic functions: start your car, turn on the heat, unlock your doors or boot, and manage the car alarm. The range is effectively infinite too, since all communication is carried out over cell networks—no line of sight contact necessary.

Edited: October 25th, 2009

New life in my old mac

For the past few months my macs felt like its on its last legs. This weekend i decided to replace the old knackered 100GB hard drive with a new 500GB one. I wasn’t expecting any changes in performance but the old disk must have slowing down the machine a little, as it now boots up a little quicker.

Either way its a really straight forward process and there a few tutorials on Youtube on how to do it, its not 100% necessary to watch them but if you are uncomfortable with this type of thing I would suggest taking a peak at them. The only thing worth noting is you will need both a Torx T6 screwdriver as well as a normal Phillips screwdriver

The insides were very compact and tidy, next time I build a pc from scratch i’ll try and use some flat ribbon sata cables.

Anyways, now i’ve got a spare 2.5 inch sata drive which I need to put in something. Maybe in an old Gameboy?

Edited: October 11th, 2009

blog still under construction

Doing a bit of work to sort out the theme, so theres not a great deal to see just yet.

Edited: September 12th, 2009