The small handheld unit plugs into your vehicle's OBD-II port and can be used for data acquisition, diagnostics, as an
extra set of gauges
and as a good old fashioned handheld computer. The secret to this little guy's high must-have quotient is the fact it runs on Linux and comes with tools to help you write custom software for it. So besides what it can do out of the box, a clever programmer can have it be a
GPS sat nav unit, multimedia player, or even an actual onboard computer.
http://www.drewtech.com/products/dashdaq.html
$600 in 2007 they say. Sounds fairly interesting and won a SEMA award.
It looks interesting but its a bit too much in my opinion. It wouldn't be hard to build a black box that does the same thing at half the cost. When you get home, you could plug it in and download all of the information. It seems to me that the screen would just get in the way.
I am happy to see more consumer products embracing Linux.
I dont think it's going to have enough computing power to do much.
200Mhz is not nearly enough to display and keep up with a GPS application.
The min people are using for car PC solutions these days are 1ghz
processors. I just dont think that processor will be able to do it. And
it's kinda bulky. It's kind of a hard decision but they might have been
better off doing a seperate display and put everything else in the box so
that they could make the casing slimmer.
Not a bad idea, but I dont really see it taking off. It's a good start
though, they just need to offer a few different options.
I think 200Mhz is more than enough to keep up with a GPS.
A lot of cell phones these days have GPS receivers in them and my Blackberry Pearl can pair with a bluetooth GPS receiver and display my route.
I can see the product doing well w/ the tuner market, you get an OBDII reader that you can control.
The size reminds me of something like the NUVI or any other portable GPS unit.
The only draw back I see is that it's going to be hard to come up with your own GPS application because a big part of the cost is in the maps and route information. You still need an outside company to provide that database if you want good data and it isn't cheap.
This thing has been updated with some pretty interesting features for competition, moding and all around fun. Anyone getting one?
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