Introduction

Hi Gang,

I've been tooling with the idea of building an interface for my
B5 Passat. I purchased the SAE specs on the electrical interface
and planned on building an RS232 converter around an Atmel AVR chip,
a few optoisolators, and a MAX232 or similar. I never got very far,
because I am a software person and my hardware skills are minimal.
(I have a rough schematic but I have not tried it.)

I purchased a laptop computer for the specific purpose of buying the
Carcomp VWtool to run on it. This was just days after the unfortunate
passing of the gentleman behind Carcomp. :(

I am also building a computer which will live in my car. It is based
on a TMC single board computer, with an AMD K6-2 @ 120 MHz (no cooling
needed, low power). I built my own switching power supply to run
the computer, +5 @ 5A & +12 @ 30ma. The system runs Linux, and also
has a 12 GB Travelstar drive, a PCMCIA WaveLAN card (for data transfer
between my home computer & the car), and an LCD display. The interface
is built around a Sony "joystick" controller. The primary function is
(you have probably guessed it by now) an MP3 player. But I would also
like to integrate diagnostics, as well as having more fully-functional
diagnostics available from my laptop.

What work has been done at this point, and where is work needed? Is
there a CVS tree set up anywhere? If not, I would be willing to host
one. What license will be used for this project? I hope GPL.

What's this I hear about an alternative interface that doesn't use J/K?

Regards,

Jeff

 
Received on Mon Mar 20 08:17:18 2000