Carman needs some love

For some time Carman, the car OBD-II analyser, had been incompatible with the OS2008 release of the maemo platform. Lots of noise and much anticipation was directed towards INDT to get it working with the new OS release and seemingly silently, with no fanfare, it is now available for download. After installing it I can see why.

Carman promises a lot. Plug a bluetooth device into your cars OBD-II port and Carman can show you fault codes, engine temps, engine loads, fuel status e.t.c. There is so much potential there especially with today's energy conciousness. Carman could tell you your current mpg and optimal mpg/speed depending of past recorded data. It could show you the condition of your engine, again looking at past data. Maybe it could anticipate engine problems as it analyses certain sensors that show that it is getting progressively worse over time. Carman could be great but ...

.. at the moment it needs a lot of love. I find that it has a hard time connecting to my OBD-II scanner, it crashes too oftern and some of the data it reports is inconsistent and way out from what is actually happening. Nokia and INDT should be pushing Carman, along with Canola and a Maemo Mapper integration as the ultimate 'in car solution'. Instead, this little know and even less used application is seemingly being left to rot away.

Lets hope INDT have high hopes for it and are just not being public with their intentions yet. Maybe it's time to put my Python hat on and spend some time on another project other than Entertainer?

Entertainer 0.1 Released

OK, its been a couple of days since the 0.1 release of entertainer and I purposely didn't blog about it until now.

0.1 is a major milestone for the entertainer project. It may seem such an insignificant number but 0.1 signifies the projects intentions. It shows that we have a piece of software that we are happy to show the rest of the world. We know it's a little ugly in parts, hell, even we are a little repulsed by parts of it but we know that with time and effort a swan can be made of this ugly duckling.

At this point in time, its a functional and pretty interface to your media. The plan is to make it even better!

Coming up in future releases:

Plugin support

TV Support

A rewrite of the backend indexer

Code clean-up

and of course lots and lots of cool plugins

And much much more.

Entertainer is an exciting up-and-coming project. Be part of it today.