I’ve been thinking for quite a while about wiring various things into one of my cars[1]. Clearly a Mini-ITX-based computer is a must, ideally hooked into an after-market whip antenna for 802.11{a,b,g} (big bonus: magic resynching with the next day’s playlist when it’s parked behind my apartment and, thus, on my home wireless… so this is probably something that’d go in both cars). From there, what next?
There’s the interface. Are dash-mounted LCDs really up to snuff? Do I want want a wireless (BlueTooth? IRDA?) keyboard or just a chording keypad? Where and how does all that extraneous crap get stored while I’m actually driving?
But the real idea kicking around now is a roadtrip webcam. Velcroing a QuickCam to the dash is easy, and running the cabling back to the Mini-ITX in the trunk only slightly less so. Then there’s connectivity, since 802.11 hotspots on a long drive aren’t likely to be too frequent. Are cell-modems really useable? Obviously, I’d turn my nose up at them for my usual Internet usage (mostly SSH connections), since the latency would blow, but if I’m just dumping a webcam image and checking an IMAP server every fifteen minutes or so, it seems like it’d cut it. But are the rates even moderately reasonable for this kind of thing yet?
A car tricked out this way would kick ass for One Lap (or any other Cannonball-style races, but I don’t know of any others still running these days), even if it didn’t do too well in the race. It’d get people interested in the race who might not have been, and give people not following along physically a fairly immediate view into the progress around the nation. Even outside of a competition like this, the idea of driving a long distance alone seems pretty manageable if I’ve got a webcam broadcasting and see email pop-up periodically throughout the trip. (Obviously, I wouldn’t really read or reply to email except when I was making a gas or food stop anyway.)
[1] Yeah, I’ve got two now. They’re both A3 VW Jettas, a ‘94 Jetta III GL and a ‘98 Jetta K2. The latter’s my daily driver, and I’m toying with turning the former into an SCCA competition car, possibly in their newly reinstituted ClubRally program. More on that another time.
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