- MacWorld is coming up in a few days so I thought I’d cover the Mac-in-a-Car angle. Here’s a great how-to for putting a Mini in your car: Carputer and a commercial restoration firm’s install of a mini-in-a-Jeep. In fact there’s a whole website dedicated to putting a Mac Mini in your vehicle, MacVroom. You can even buy a dock in case you want to easily move the computer from car to house.
- Most of the in-car computer sites are adding the computer for music, video, or GPS functionality. Very few, if any, are integrating data acquisition so they can monitor a string of, say, EV batteries. Here’s a few solutions for the mini: bTop, National Instruments, LabJack, Data Translation, and Instrutech.
- As for software to control or make sense of all of this data there’s of course the built in perl/php/ruby/mysql and apache webserver included with OS X, not to mention free full-bore developer tools. I use php/mysql to store the data and jpgraph to render the weather at our house. There’s also commercial offerings like Igor, Labview and even open source projects like iDash and RoadNav. You could analyze the squeaks in your conversion like crazy using the Electroacoustics Toolbox.
- Or just do it all in legos...
