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Our Blogs Open Sauce LCA2009: geeking your ride
Our Blogs Open Sauce LCA2009: geeking your ride | LCA2009: geeking your ride |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 09 January 2009 | |
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Page 3 of 3 One of the possibilities he sees is that a car owner can have a subscription with a particular mechanic, log into his website and allow his car to be diagnosed from a remote location. Featured Whitepaper
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He predicts that it will not be long before some manufacturer comes up with a car which has an internet connection on-board. In other words, your car will be an active internet node. Though he and Herbohn thought up the idea at the 2008 Linux conference, they have been coding only for the last three months. All their code is up for sharing on the website and it's all released under the General Public Licence. They've used Linux, Python for talking to the engine management system and MySQL for storing all the data and engine performance parameters. The Apache web server software provides the web interface and data can be fed back to manufacturers if needed. "Manufacturers sell you a car and they never see or hear about it thereafter. With this kind of system there can be a lot of feedback that will help in development of better vehicles," says Oxer. Data collected can be used to analyse driving habits and usage patterns of vehicles; this could be then used to improve fuel efficiency. Oxer does not see much of problem with the privacy implications as he says that the date can always be anonymised. There are distinct commercial possibilities as well. While Oxer has no interest in the commercial aspect - all his code is going to be publicly available under th GPL - he admits there are several interesting possibilities. Honda, for example, is working on a car-to-car communication system based on a wireless LAN. This would make vehicles "aware" of the presence of other vehicles, using GPS data, and thereby helping to reduce accidents, especially in places where visibility is hampered by fixed or movable objects. For Oxer, it is, more than anything else, fun to work on a project such as Geek My Ride. All the things he tries out are relatively low-cost, hence the level of interest that the project has generated is high. |
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