jsn-079

The plan was to replace the explorer.exe with the main executable when it was as good as finished, or good enough for a daily driver app. You had several shell replacements in that era doing similar things (SharpE/SharpEnvironment comes to mind, which was also developed using Delphi and is still available on sourceforge) But since it was an application still in development, I think I went the easier route to be able to manage stuff on the PC itself; e.g. put a shortcut in the autostart menu (or maybe it was the registry), scaled the form to the screen resolution, forced it to stay-on-top and removed the form borders. This way, I'd still had access to the desktop if necessary (for trying out new updates etc).

I had such project running for some 2 years around 2008-2010, but it didn't gain much interest from the public. My hardware was based around one of the first Intel dual core Atom ITX based boards and had a M3-ATX power supply (this gracefully shut down the PC when you turned of the car engine. The earlier models just cut the power to the PC, which wasn't favourable). All put into a special ITX case looking just like an external amp. I can't remember the screen though, it was a motorized touchscreen with a blind front when closed. It opened automatically when the engine was started. The audio output was connected to a 4 channel amp with a subwoofer and actually sounded awesome. The soundcard on the Atom board was miles ahead for what the default headunit of the car provided, and with 5.1 separated channel support. It eventually got custom graphics from an actual designer, but he moved on to a commercial CarPC project soon after because the graphics framework couldn't compete with the smooth animations Android offered and he didn't like the speed of development (hey, it was a 1-man project in spare time). It was based on the Graphics32 library with -I think- the BASS audio library for playback of audio on multiple channels. Due to licensing of some of the external components, I'd chosen to provide it for free, although it was not opensourced. It had a plugin system with a couple of plugins for interior/exterior temperature monitoring (using the USB-Temper modules), displaying USB GPS receiver data, navigation using Garmin for PCs hosted in a window locked in a specific location, external signals (e.g. to connect steering wheel buttons), video playback, a USB FM radio receiver, ELM327 OBD-II interface, and some more stuff I can't remember. A front/rear camera plugin was also in development (can't remember if I ever finished this one.. the available webcams were quite horrible in low-light conditions, but I think I got some acceptable results using a Microsoft VX800). It also provided a Jukebox mode for the music playback where it tried to find music in the same genre you're currently playing. Unfortunately, the website I had for this is now defunct and mp3car.com doesn't seem to be in existence anymore either. I stopped developing it due to lack of interest from the public and the introduction of Android based headunits. The world moved on to those things, instead of Car PC's, understandably. But maybe I can dig up the code for this, I'll go look for it tonight.. might be a fun project to revive, although I don't have as much time for it anymore. I did find some of the earlier screenshots of it though (before it got more professional looking graphics).