Car Mode Application...

Staley, Daniel L dlstal2 at uky.edu
Tue May 27 17:08:04 CEST 2008


So now that the freerunner is almost upon us (my friends will be glad when it finally comes out after a year of telling them "a couple months from now I'll have it!"),  I have thought about what my first project is going to be.

Being the nerd and impulsive buyer I am, I have bought a wireless bluetooth keyboard (perfect for the freerunner i think... http://www.amazon.com/Stowaway-Ultra-Slim-Bluetooth-Blackberry-Handhelds/dp/B0002OKCXE ) for programming on the go, an external GPS antenna with a magnetic end to boost my GPS reception in the car, and finally a car "phone/GPS dash holder" to have a place to set my freerunner while driving.

I decided that I am going to try to implement a program that will give me the most functionallity possible while driving...therefore (this may be wishful thinking...so please tell me if something sounds impossible):

(First plug in an FM transmitter to the freerunner's headphone jack to transmit all sounds to the car stereo)
* Play music and/or podcasts while scrolling the name of the current song across the screen

* Press a rather large button in the bottom right corner of the screen to switch from music mode into direction mode.  In direction mode, the screen displays Either a Large arrow pointing the direction of your location, or displays the next road that needs to be turned on and how close it is in large text. (Music/Voice from other modes should still be played while the GUI displays this).  When the road approaches, the program should cut out the music for a moment and use freeTTS to read something like "Turn right on Lovelaceville Road.".  (The directions would of course have to have been downloaded from wlan or GPRS)

* If someone calls while the program is running, ideally I would like the program to pause all music etc and say "Incoming call from Fred" and display 2 large buttons "Ignore" and "Accept."  If accept is pressed, I want the phone to go into speakerphone mode, but still to route the audio to the car speakers.  I'm wondering if it would be possible to cancel out the repeating of the caller's audio back into the microphone?  I'm not up to date on my noise cancellation techniques ;).   If this doesnt seem plausable, just going into speakerphone mode, or talking through a bluetooth headset will be acceptable.

* Once the voice recognition SoC project is done, I'd also like to interface with that to implement voice commands for the program such as "Moko, next song" or "Moko, take call", or even "Moko, new destination" (followed by the new destination so that typing it in prior to driving would not be nessiary.)

What do you guys think?  Possible?  Are the interrupts sent from the GSM modem on incoming call possible to catch before the dialer app gets them?  Would it be possible to get the voice cancellation good enough to implement the phone over car speaker feature?  And finally....would anyone else be interested in joining the project?

If no one says that it would be impossible for some reason, I'll probably start drawing up some test cases, examples screens, and basic code flow.

-Dan Staley






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