Got digidash code to run reasonably fast on an embedded VIA EDEN machine with a datafeed from a live engine. Nice framerate.

Porting the whole thing to iPAQ/familiar which turned out not to have svgalib available.

Some dude @ freenode:#handhelds.org claimed it was, so I went with that lib a few months back when I started coding. Luckily, it is a quick move to get things to run on /dev/fb.

Image compiler needs a tad of rework, though. Hacketyhack.

Got back from a business trip to the east coast.
All hail Compaq Presario X1000 and the Centrino chipset with over three hours of battery life.
Together with my Sony MDR-NC20 noise canceling headphones and earplugs, life on a 757 becomes bearable.

Started to look into a new telco design for SS7 level routing. Big phat non-database-driven engine will have to be developed to manage the calls per second requirement. Fun.

Bought new Canon G5 camera. Shot an amazing amount of totally stupid pictures. 256Mb flash, coming up.

Dash demo awoke big time interest. A number of contacts are lined up for further talk. I am not driving this one. So, for a change, I can sit on my ass and wait for progress reports.

Off to Sweden on Saturday to perform annual rite of mid-winter virgin sacrifice and pagan dead animal feast. Cold.

Managed to triple the frame rate by using a repaint method that was not completely brain dead. Ahem. The whole thing now looks almost-decent even without hardware acceleration.

Considering dumping Qt and go for raw framebuf control. The only thing we really need Qt for today is reading PNG files. Think think.

Demo wrapped up in self-contained case with screen, c-dash, SBC and a power supply.

I haven't seen it, but it is supposedly very nice.

G is off to the PRI show to demo the whole thing to a couple of compaines. Will this thing fly saleswise? We are about to find out.

Exciting.

Fina-fucking-ly.

The c-dash was configured to read analog values and pulses, not the PI System 3 datastream. Once that was fixed (through the setup menues), it kicked immediately. Three hours later I had implemented the entire Sys3 protocol, although the C-dash reads only five or six values from it.

It synched up nicely with the other instruments.

We gave up on getting our desired display, and went for our crude 6.4" 4:3 one with the humoungus VGA board. ShitShitShitOhWell.

Hooked up PI-research's C-dash to serial port and fed it a System 3 data stream. Not a single twitch in the display. Crap! Changed pin config in the DB9 to no avail.

Will solder a Y harness with ECU, C-dash and a traffic snooping laptop to check what a correct datastream looks like.

Nice splash screen on demo covers up eternal load time.

Demo setup complete.

Framerate sucks since I do not use hardware. Next embedded computer we buy should have linux/qt support for video chipset (Matrox, Voodoo, etc).

Moving on to drive external instrument stack (PI research c-dash).

Very tired...

Video works. Yay! MPG streams a bit choppy without hardware acceleration, but proof of concept has been made. Sound to be added.

Wrote data cycle generator that produces channel streams based on XML config file content. Very nice.

Kewl transflective screen still not delivered. Nice work from a company whose slogan is "Today is not fast enough". Retards.

Got the SBC with an VIA Eden 667Mhz CPU and a Savage display chipset. Went over to Frys and bought 256MB RAM, 256MB flash card and a 20 gb laptop drive. Nice package.

RedHat installed. 2.4.22 installed. RPMed in libc.386. Up and running. Just vesa inegration with the chipset since I haven't installed the frame buffer driver yet.

Made a minimalistic installation on flash card, which now boots and executes demo. Filesystems are mounted read only so a reset shouldn't affect their integrity. (/tmp = /dev/ram)

Hooked up existing screen to VGA port. Result looked good. Backlighting circuitry fried my thumb with high voltage. Smelled BBQ.

Complete demo cycle now executable. Just need to add menues after boot to select which demo to see.

Awaiting next instrument design from M.

Will now do PI c-dash integration to drive display and dash in parallel.

Built Qt framework for instrumentation and data producers. It seems like I have to choose between flicker (p.drawPixmap directly to screen) or 1.2 FPS (double buffering). Qt/Embedded hopefully a tad faster with framebuffer support.

Next protocol is time-based dummy data generator. After that PI_SYS_3 to read off Pectel T2 and T6.

Need to install speed reader on front wheel of Caterham 7 to get MPH reading and calculated gear position.

Still awaiting transflective screen and embedded PC from We-Cannot-Seem-To-Fucking-Deliver Sharp.

Looking for a simple mapping application to integrate. Roadmap looked good until I realized that there is absolutely no documentation or commenting on the code. Biatch. I'll probably canibalize the good parts of it and morph it into my own class structure.

Metallic skin done. Awaiting minimalistic/traditional skin.

Framework in place for reading XML based config files.