Thursday, November 22, 2007

Geeks on Tour


You may like this photo taken this afternoon on the A1(m) travelling back to the north-east from Nottingham



2 Nokia 770's side by side in a incar holder. the one on the left (mine) is running Maemo Mapper navigation with a bluetooth GPS unit, and the one on the right (james') is running CarMan engine diagnostic software showing live engine data collected by a bluetooth ODBII inteface plugged in to a socket in the car's cabin. Unfortunately my camera phone is rubbish. We also took some with James' phone, and I may post them later if they are better.

We downloaded and installed carman over a 3G mobile phone connection. We were also running Satnav software on James' phone connected to another bluetooth GPS receiver.

Maemo Mapper came into it's own though as a zoomable moving map, as the M1 northbound was closed. The conventional satnav was trying it's damnest to get us back on the M1 as soon as we turned off. MM just let us zoom out and look to plan our own route across to the A1, using it as an electronic road map.

The other major plus of MM over conventional satnav, is the ability to use satellite images as the map which is very useful when navigating complex road networks in a strange town.

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