90% of the detectors are dummys ... I wouldn't want a detector in my car.

I have one of the 10% that are pretty smart, the best radar detector on the market IMHO: The Valentine One.

It can track up to eight different signals simultaneously, X Band, K Band, KA Band, Laser, or any combination thereof, and tell me which type of signal, how many of them there are, what direction each one coming from, and how far away each one is.

I routinely pick up radar signals that are around the corner, over the hill, and more than a mile away. My detecter is so good that when it signals, I don't slow down -- I evaluate the situation to decide whether I even need to be concerned.

The only risk I have from radar is the "Instant On" variety in which the policeman hides and only turns the unit on when the potential offender is within range. Where I live, most police cruise the highway with their radar units turned on all the time, so I know where they are while they are still a mile or more away.

Policemen aren't out to bugger you, they just want safe and coordinated traffic-infrastructure...

[Soapbox] Maybe where you live... in the U.S., speeding fines are a significant source of municipal revenue. The insurance companies love it because it is an easily quantifiable violation that allows them to justify rate increases. The American public has been brainwashed with the concept that "Speed Kills" for so long that few people even question the idea, even though a more apt motto might be "Speed Differentials Kill". If our police wanted a "safe and coordinated traffic-infrastructure" they would start writing tickets to people who drive in the left lane when not passing, and take serious measures to get the drunks off the road. (Last year a drunk driver killed a pedestrian in Anchorage -- the driver had had SIX previous DWI convictions.) [/Soapbox]

tanstaafl.



"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Regarding your soapbox, Doug:

I think that excessive speed can be a problem if the drivers aren't attentive. There are some speeders who are poor drivers and don't pay close attention to what they're doing. In those instances, the speed contributes to the amount of damage they do in an accident.

On the other hand, a fast driver who is attentive enough to avoid cops (i.e., he is constantly scanning the vehicles around him and paying close attention to onramps) is also a safer driver than many of the slow ones.

I like the idea that drivers should be afraid of cops catching them for speeding. Keeps a nice system whereby most folks drive a little more safely, but a few attentive speeders still get away with speeding. Those that aren't attentive get caught.

If only people in this country would keep right, then everything would be perfect...

___________
Tony Fabris

I don't like police enough that I drive the speed limit to avoid contact with then it makes everone else mad but I don't care I always have someone driving too close behind me

it makes everone else mad but I don't care I always have someone driving too close behind me

As long as you stay in the right lane, you're cool with me.


___________
Tony Fabris

90% of the detectors are dummys ... I wouldn't want a detector in my car.


I have one of the 10% that are pretty smart, the best radar detector on the market IMHO: The Valentine One.

Oops, my fault, I ment :

90% of the camera's are dummys ... I wouldn't want a detector in my car.

They rotate the camera's constantly... The flashes work though...

I am not someone who is racing through the neighbourhood; within city limits, I mostly obey the rules. When I speed, it is rarely because I am in a hurry. I just think a higher speed makes my ride more enjoyable. That's the main reason why I don't have one. Using a detector feels like sticking your middlefinger to your highschool teacher when he's standing with his back to you, though you know it would have felt much better if you did it in his face...

I don't hope I start a flame-war now

My experience with the police is that you can go 135 where you are allowed 120, and no attempt is made to pull you over. Worst case is a policeman waving to slow down. People getting pulled over are excessive speeders ( 150+ ), emergency-lane drivers, bumper-glue-ons, slow traffic ( 70- ), ghostdrivers, drunks, bikers without helmets, trucks with cattle, overloaded caravans, etc, etc...
I'm leaving for vacation in a few weeks, so I'll have the chance to have a few hours of allowed speeding in the south of germany if the weather is good. Last year,when it was raining, we were passed by a mercedes which was going 160+.
A few kilometers ahead his car crashed in a concrete pillar. Not a pretty sight...

Well, all I wanted to say is that I'm glad I'm living in this small, liberal country called the netherlands. There aren't many places in the world where you can ask a policeman for directions while smokin a reefer


Frank van Gestel

I have a V1 and that thing is great!

Calvin

Well, all I wanted to say is that I'm glad I'm living in this small, liberal country called the netherlands. There aren't many places in the world where you can ask a policeman for directions while smokin a reefer

I agree, as long as you do that on foot

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

Of course; he won't be so tolerant otherwise...

Frank van Gestel

FRANK! I am soooooo SHOCKED!

You would ask a policeman for directions? What did your parents teach you?

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Shouldn't that be correct lane, Tony? On this side of the Atlantic that means you are advocating exactly what you just proselytised!

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Ok, enough said about speeding, let's get back to the topic.

Edwin de Vaan
mk2 rev.7 Trillian # 080000263 6Gb blue/red

In reply to:

---

I think you may have read this post from me as I was waiting for Patrick's board here (unsubtle hint) before I did anything further. I am currently working on my own ECU for my Mini which a scratch CPU design based on a Motorola processor. Most of the peripheral bits are going to be BOSCH (ironic given what happened to the MIni brand ). My idea was to try and write my dataport to comply to OBD II and feed it into the serial port of the empeg while docked so that I could run a display terminal on the screen of the empeg without having to carry a portable computer around with me.

---

Okay, now you are starting to scare me ... You're not kidding are you ?

Hans

Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

Well we have to keep a thread dating from October 1999 alive somehow!

(Patrick, how long you gonna keep everyone waiting for this toy??)

Rob

No, I'm not joking at all. I have just tested the CPU core section of the ECU and I am starting on the Input sensor circuitry. I intend to put it in the car and just read air mass, ignition, throttle position, etc. to see that it can interrogate sensors OK, then it's going to be rigged to actually control the ignition, but not the carburetion. I don't know enough about fuelling strategies and even less about the fuel demands of this car, so injection management will be a while coming. I have, however, got a 4-coil ignition pack wired and tested, and I am getting a special injector fuel rail started based on Weber manifolds (the only ones small enough to go onto the Mini intake side).

When it all comes together (no hurry, I'm patient) I have no way of tuning the fuelling other than by tweaking tables of injector openings for different RPM; normally, this would be automated and done on a rolling road, but I have neither the money nor facilities to do this, so I am going to have to spend a long time doing it manually across all engine speeds and loads. The best way to do it is get the fuelling roughly right, then drive the car and record what the lambda sensor in the exhaust pipe says about the mixture. Recording means some sort of data dump, and the board has a number of I/O ports available. Instead of carrying a portable around to capture it and having to deal with batteries and all that rubbish, I thought that the empeg would be a good alternative. Hence, a small background daemon process that runs and just sniffs OBDII data, and dumps it to disk. There is the obvious problem of the disks being mounted read-only during normal operation which I have yet to deal with. Additionally, if I did want to use the empeg as a control/monitoring/tuning device, then I would have to have control of the display (for gauges, counters, so forth) something I haven't investigated too deeply. I have been tracking what people have been doing here on the board, and when the time comes, I'm sure there will be help available.

One other early experiment which is waiting for an I/O board is a set of accelerometers and suspension extension potentiometers which I want to use to look at how the car is cornering and tracking, etc. This was going to be via the A/D on Patrick's board. However, since I have a fair bit of extra capacity for unsupervised A/D on my ECU, I may just connect them up to the ECU and feed the data back through OBDII as well. Think about that - your empeg being able to display your acceleration in g, show a graph of your suspension movement (selectable by wheel of course) alongside your average fuel consumption....

Whatever floats your boat, dudes.

Really scared yet? You should be - it will be on Dutch roads sometime

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Yeah, Patrick, how long you gonna keep everyone waiting for this toy?

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

Yeah, Patrick, how long you gonna keep everyone waiting for this toy?

It's NOT a toy!

Hopefully, once I've got the current set of PCBs off to have some prototypes made for the xxxxx Project, (which allows xxxxxxx to xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx, which is pretty cool), I'll have some spare time and can finish off the empeg expansion board/turbine ECU board/general purpose microcontroller board.

And it will have accelerometers on as well, since it needs them for the autonomous flying robot function subset anyway.

Patrick.



Opinions expressed in this email may contain up to 42% water by weight, and are mine. All mine.

And will this system also monitor how hard you're pedaling the Mini?

___________
Tony Fabris

If you look closely at this picture, you can just see the little feet sticking out under the driver's side floor. In the background, Rob V. is holding his nose in disgust after someone farted. In the foreground, the Grim Reaper (TM) is about to harvest two innocent souls as they root in the boot of the Laguna for sausage rolls that have rolled under the back seat.

It were a good day out, it were.

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

I think I suddenly start to understand why so often cars are burning by the side of the road in Holland. On the 50 kilometers alone I drive every day to work I see l like 8 scorch marks as remaining evidence of such an event.

JUST KIDDING !! (Not about the scorch marks though)

To be honest, it sounds like an awesome project. I hope I get to see it firsthand someday. I am not much of a mechanic (not for cars that is, though I used to do some mean motor cycle mods in my teens) but never the less this defenitly peaks my interest.

Keep me (us?) posted I say.

Cheers,
Hans

Mk2 - Blue - 080000431

Here's a new twist on an old thread.

Rather than require that each piece of hardware be customized to some new protocol, how about using something like this:http://www.linux-usb.org/USB-guide/x356.html

With a supported piece of hardware, this would let you connect up many unmodified serial devices (GPS reciever, OBD-II adapter, laptop, etc) while still leaving the built-in serial port free for connection to a Sony (or other brand) stalk.

I guess the real question is: can we convince mlord to add module support to hijack?
(the other modules I'd like to load are IrCOMM and IrOBEX drivers)

This is about the top misunderstanding about the empeg:

THE EMPEG OR RIOCAR DOES NOT, REPEAT: DOES NOT, SUPPORT USB MASTER.

You can only connect the riocar/empeg to USB master devices, like a PC or MAC. You can not connect USB slave devices, like additional serial ports, network adaptors or printers to it.

cu,
sven

Well, that's unfortunate.

There's still other alternatives. Some terminal servers come with device drivers that give you a /dev entry that maps to a serial port on the termserv via ethernet. I think this is getting more expensive, but still could be an option.

TINI could be a good option for additional I/O. It's an embedded platform that is the size of a SIMM and runs Java. Fairly inexpensive, provides ethernet, IP, serial, and some other goodies.

http://www.ibutton.com/TINI/

Sounds like an interesting idea. With features such as "Wide operating temperature range, -20°C to +70°C" it sounds well suited to staying in the car too. I was thinking $50 was a bit expensive but considering all the IO it's got, you wouldn't need very many:
- 10 Base-T Ethernet for networking
- Dual serial ports
- Dual 1-Wire® net interfaces
- Dual CAN (Controller Area Network) controllers
- 2-wire synchronous serial bus
- General-purpose digital I/O

The dual serial ports could be used one for GPS and one for OBD-II. You'd have to write a some code to transfer the data via the network... maybe via HTTP. I'm not sure what type of approach to take on this. This would have the advantage of not needing custom drivers like what I was thinking about.

TINI could be a good option for additional I/O

One downside to these is that they seem to only be producing small batches as development systems. I ordered one about three months ago and still have not received it. But, since I already have one coming (in theory) and don't really have a use planned for it yet, integration with the empeg could be cool.

-Mike

hmmmm,

this board thingie sounds interesting!

I ordered one about three months ago and still have not received it.

Well it just showed up yesterday. I like it, it is cool. I haven't had much time to play with it yet, but it does seem like it would make a neat expansion board to the empeg.

-Mike

Any news on Patrick's version of this? Is anything likely to appear now that the empeg car is no longer in production/being sold?

Cheers,

A.

Any news on Patrick's version of this? Is anything likely to appear now that the empeg car is no longer in production/being sold?

If you read Patricks announcement of trying to get some tuner modules made, he talked about changing the tuner design so that it provided analog and digital outputs within the tuner itself.

Ahh, nice... I have no desperate desire for a tuner, so I kinda skipped over that thread... but if it did (some of) the features of this, I would definately buy one.

Cheers,

A.