SatNav technologies this festival season has  gifts galore for anyone wishing to buy a SatNav product. This season, SatNav will give away over 10 FREE TRAVEL TICKETS to BANGKOK , more than 10 SatGuide PNDs and hundreds of Mobile Phone and Laptop softwares across various retail outlets. In all SatNav will be giving away prizes and gifts worth Rs. 1 crore at  large format retailers (FRs) like Croma, EZone, HyperCity, Reliance Digital, Staples and many more.

The offer that began on September 15^th, 2009 ; extends for a period of two and a half months until November 30^th, 2009. For a product purchase above Rs 3,000 at listed LFRs, the customers become eligible for the lucky draw and a chance to take away free gifts from SatNav.

SatNav Technlogies makes GPS based technologies that are popular worldwide.

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StaNav technologies ( a pioneer of GPS Navigation in India and provider of India’s 1^st GPS navigation software, SatGuide) recently sent us an email asking us to consider their product SatGuide PND Moov 300. Priced at Rs.16,990.This device comes preloaded with details of 200+ cities on Guide maps and more than 15 lakh destinations and can be quite handy for the regular traveler. Voice prompted directions and entertainment are also on offer and they all come at affordable rates than the ones available right now. Also unlike mobile pho9ne based navigation this does not need GPRS or a WiFi connection to keep it powered. More infomation can be had at www.satguide.in.

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I came to see about an open source firmware for wifi routers last week. The main advantage of this firmware is, you can install this firmware to your favorite routers like linksys, broadcom routers etc. I had a try on this to my Linksys WRT54G router.  This is not only a firmware for a router you can even manage the data usage to each and every clients that are connected with this router using a Web UI provided with the firmware. The Web UI has the inbuilt facility manage different clients with help  of Web UI.You can mark the clients in the map available with firmware. It uses google maps for this.

Download your device specific firmware and configure it. Control your clients data usage. We can deploy this in areas like hotels, public parks, chill out place etc. Design your data plan and resell it to your customers!!!!

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OpenOBEX is an open source implementation of Object Exchange (OBEX) protocol. This implementation is supported list below.

INFRARED DATA ASSOCIATION ® (IrDA) http://www.irda.org

USB-IF, Inc. http://www.usb.org

Bluetooth(TM) http://www.bluetooth.com

Support for TCP/IP links, file descriptors and custom transports is also provided. This project can be downloaded from OpenObex. Lots of supporting projects are happening based on OpenOBEX. Moreover this is supported with win32 also which increase the scope of the project along with Linux.

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The Novel networks announced a portable wireless router with 3G connectivity called MiFi. This router can be integrated with exiting EVDO or HSPA high speed data access network. The size of the device is ultra small as compared to a credit card.

This can be shared not only with users but also with devices like laptops, camera, mobiles, multimedia devices etc..

The device support up-to 5 users simultaneously. This device has a on-board Linux processor capable of hosting application and an external storage media, MicroSD. So the device can be used as a hot spot along with a EVDO or HSPA internet connection.

The Novatel claims the internal battery can provide 40 hours standby time and 4 hours active usage on a single charge. The MiFi will be available in the first quarter of 2009 and the expected cost of the device is under $300.

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As I mentioned in my earlier post that we can enable our car WiFi by 2 means.

(i) Using Laptop as and enabler to internet connection.

(ii) Using Single board computer in place of Laptop as internet connection enabler.

The main advantage by using Laptop is we can even avoid router(Access Point) by configuring the machine to a point to point wifi access. The disadvantage is we need to carry laptop every time for internet connection.

The advantage of using SBC in place of laptop rule out the disadvantage of (i). We need to buy an SBC to make car wifi enabled which cost around $120.

I am mentioning simple and easiest method that is method (i) now. For this we need to configure our laptop for point to point wifi access. The main advantage of using method (i) is we can avoid access point(AP).

The figure above shows the architecture diagram of our simplest wifi car. The EVDO is connected to the first wireless laptop which will serves internet to other system(s) using point to point network. I will explain the step to step procedure now.

Click on the Network connection in control panel(Start menu->Control Panel->Network and Internet Connections->Network connections).

On the properties window click on the wireless network tab and Add a new connection.

Add a name for the network let it be “MyHomeNetwork” and make the authentication as shown in the figure above. You can add a password which can be used to secure your network. The main and ultimate thing is that you need to change your wireless network as adhoc(point to point) network by checking the check box shown in figure above. Click OK to save the settings. Yeah your system is ready to work as point to point wireless serving device and also a gateway for internet. Connect EVDO driver program to get internet connection.

Carry the system you configured now for getting internet connection in your car.

Your Peer system(s) can be connect to this network. Search for wireless network you can see a wireless network named “MyHomeNetwork”. Connect to the network with key assigned during the process.

My next post will describe the way to make your car wifi using Single board computer. Which is more promising WiFi car.

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I am using Lenovo laptop with Windows Vista. The wifi access in this laptop is not much user friendly. It is not possible for a novice user to connect a wifi network without much hurdles. The lenovo laptops are packaged with a wireless management tool called Think Vandage. You can see the application when we start lenovo care application. The application is not at all user friendly. But my point of discussion is the process involved in connecting your lenovo system for point to point wifi access.

Where comes point to point wifi access?

This kind of wifi networking can be done with your system or laptop. The only requirement is your system / laptop does have wifi card. We don’t need a separate wifi router to serve content to other system(s). The connection is point to point, that is from one system to other system. You can even share internet connection to nearby device using point to point network.

The process involved in connecting to point to point network.

The first process involved is double click on the computer icon shown on your desktop toolbar.

On the new window which is “Access Connections” click on the Locations menu and select the menu item Create New Profile... New window will open which contain information needed to add new profile.

Enter a name of the location profile(which might be some dummy name like PtoP or Sythoos). Select the network connection type as Wireless LAN 802.11. Click on the next button. On the next window enter Network name (SSID), this is the name of the Point to Point network. Another way to find the SSID is to search network(Click on the Find network button). Select the connection type as Adhoc.

Click on the next button. The next window is the setting window. Click on the TCP/IP setting and add IP address of same class in the Point to Point network. If your network server is something like 192.168.0.1 then you can assign an address 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.255. Enter subnet mask as 255.255.255.0 and default gateway as the IP address of the system that serves internet / main system.

Check out the TCP/IP setting below. Don’t forget to add DNS Server as the system that serves internet.

I know the procedure is not much simple, although we can’t do anything rather than following the procedure. It’s Windows Vista we need to do a lot to configure even simple things.

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We are on the way to Wagamon. I am writing this post from our Car. You know how I am getting internet? Yes we are going in our Wifi enabled car with internet connection. All of us are using our laptops. We started 1 hour back we reached Kollam now. We need to meet one of the friend here.

Hope we will get the range for internet connection everywhere. As Wagamon hill station is a tourist destination I hope we can enjoy internet there. I had experienced some sort of internet connection issues, may be due to the tower switching. Anyway I am browsing the internet without much hurdle.

The trip

We have a presentation at peerumedu Engineering college tomorrow afternoon. We will leave to Wagmon after the presentation. Will stay at the hill station tomorrow night and will come back day after. Will update you the news from Wagamon. Oh the time is approaching 10PM its time for me to sleep.

Next day.

We had the seminar at MBC college and we started to Wagamon the place is really cool. But the main problem is no network connection for Airtel and Vodafone. So we were not able to call. BSNL connection was there but the signal strength was not good. We tried to connect to internet several times but we didn’t get the connection there. But we got some signal and we finally connected from the top of the hill. My friend is a travel blogger he will describe about the trip in his travel blog.

Yes the connection is here man.

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When we develop something our own we may experience some technology issues. There are couple of technology issues with Wifi car. I will explain the hurdles below and I will suggest the solution or workaround.

The main hurdles we faced is stable electric supply to drive SBC, wifi router. Most of the Car have 12V DC output from the battery and associated dianomo. We need 20V DC with 3.5A rating and 12V with 1A rating. So we need to design some adapter to cope this. Some adapters are available online we can also buy the same. But we need to make sure that the adapter is stable one. By the time we are using a costume designed power supply for this.

Apart from the electric supply we faced another major issue. As we are using BSNL EVDO for internet connection we need the dialing driver and its stack for connecting the internet. We can’t directly use Wifi router with EVDO cards. Moreover EVDO cards can be connected to USB only. We are using a laptop to install and dial EVDO now. But we need to carry laptop every time for connecting internet, we need to avoid this bottleneck. Single board computer is a solution for this. We can install a linux operating system in a single board computer and we can plug the EVDO card in the USB available in single board computer. By using a single board computer we can reduce the power rating too. For a device from compulab (check the link above) the power rating is 3.3V and around 1A current. This device will also support operating systems like Embedded Windows XP and linux kernels. The device cost around $140, which is promising we can also use the same device as music player too.

In the coming days we will explain the procedure for installing each and every components described above. Coming post’s contain somesort of technology configurations. Don’t be baulked to ask your queries and doubts. Don’t miss any of the post in the series, you may get confused if you miss some.

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Iamatechie always believes in wireless enabled innovative ideas and its experimentations. We proudly announce “how to make your car WiFi enabled with an internet connection so that you can access internet whereever you go“. We are starting the post series which describes and demonstrate how we changed our Chevrolet Optra to WiFi enabled car.

Initially we started experimenting with a GSM/GPRS card and phone for internet connection from AIRTEL, which was pretty slow. But we moved to a 2Mbps EVDO BSNL connection now which is also cheaper wireless connection available in India for an amount 550INR monthly rental.

We are now experimenting with a laptop and linksys router (wireless access to nearby devices). But we are planning to do with single board computer instead of laptop so that we can avert plug and play procedure for internet connection every time.  Now a days size of the single board computer is very less. Even the single board computer available within the size of a thumb drive .

I guess all of my readers will participate for this experiment so that within couple of days we can bring our car Wifi enabled. Don’t miss the opportunity to participate for this experiment. Enjoy reading !!!

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