New Car

I finally decided that my 1996 Volvo 850 was getting a little long in the tooth, and that I needed a more fuel efficient car. Last Friday I bought a 2008 Kia Rio from Dorothy at Folsom Lake Kia under the Costco member discount program.

All in all it's a great little car. I'll have to post some pictures when I get a chance.

The jury is still out on exactly how much better the mileage is than the Volvo. The EPA site says 33 MPG combined on the Rio and I was getting 23 regularly with the Volvo. The payoff on gas alone is a long time, but I think it will all be a was in the end.

It is gratifying to have a new car though.

Modified AutoPilot

I had been using a belkin car kit for my older ipod, but that charged through the firewire pins which are no longer supported with the iPhone 3G hardware.

That meant buying a new line out car charger. I settled on the Griffin Technology Autopilot mainly for the play/pause and track controls. I really like the build quality on all the griffin tech products.

There was one problem: Since my car has only one 12v power port and the use of hands free devices is required in california now, I needed a way to charge my bluetooth headset. In my volvo I had rigged a multiport car charger and hidden it in the arm rest, but I am not quite ready for electrical modding projects on the new car.

So the answer was to add a USB charge cable output to the AutoPilot. Since I know it provides 5v output to the iPhone and it's rated at 2A output, it should have more than enough juice to deal with my little Motorola H700 headset.

The hardest task was getting the beautiful AutoPilot apart. The front bezel with the buttons pops off with a little effort and is held on with some strong plastic barbs that will hold up to the prying. The fuse should be removed. There's no glue on the body of the device, just some friction based plastic pins that hold it together. You can safely pry it apart without too much worry.

Once you are inside there is a well designed board for the power supply and an attached separate board for the iPhone/ipod controls.

I chopped a usb cable in half leaving about a 2 ft length attached to the mini usb connector. I tested the color coding on this cable by plugging the other end into a hub and looking for the +5v and ground wires. Luckily, they were the red and black respectively.

I piggy backed on the red +5v power wire that the iPhone control uses and soldered my red wire from the usb connector there. It's a very small board, so I ran the cable around to the front side to ensure a better connection.

The ground was easier because there were many to choose from on the board. I found an unused pad just below the black ground wire for the iPhone and soldered the black wire from the usb cable there.

Then I realized that I needed to have the cable actually exit the nice plastic case
for the Auto Pilot. I used the soldering iron to melt a hole in the bottom of the case and unsoldered all my recently made connections. Then I threaded the wire through the case and resoldered the connections.

This didn't provide any strain relief and was a very tight fit, so I used some liquid electrical tape to provide a black rubber seal on the outside. This gives a little strain relief and also a bit more of a finished look.

Then I put on a black split plastic cable management tube to keep the cables tidy and routed around the interior of the car.

I really should have taken pictures, but that never happens in the middle of a project. This is a great improvement, and I'd love to see griffin tech add something like this in a future version product for the iPhone.

Nat Geo

So I found a great site that National Geographic had listed on their corporate blog. It seems to be a community application that allows the sharing of trip data and gps tracks.

http://beta.topo.com/explore

New iPhone

I just had my 30th birthday and it coincided closely with the release of apple's new iPhone. I did end up getting the 16 GB white model along with that 2 year AT&T contract. So far the signal is good up until you reach Greenwood, but that's the way it was for Verizon until early this year. I still have 30 days to decide, but it looks like a winner.

Anyhow, I expect to be writing some more about the GPS capabilities. The main missing feature is an offline topographic map program. It must will work where there is no cell phone signal and google maps just won't do that. I'd love to see integration with National Geographic TOPO! the way that they have done with the Triton GPS device. For now I may need to make due with emailing myself PDF files printed from TOPO.

Or perhaps I should write an iPhone PDF reader that uses the location services to mark your point on a known grid... hmmm.

Even though it only has a 2 MP camera, I'll also likely be making heavy use of the geotagging on our excursions. Even if it's only to get good waypoints for a map.