CarMan

Now it is time to talk about that python project I've been working for some time. Carman is a system for accessing on-board diagnostics of any car compliant with the OBD-II standard.

The project is Open Source, LGPL licensed and almost 100% written in python. Basically, it consists in three elements:

• OBDlib:

This is a low level library responsible for the communication between the Maemo device (770 or N800) and the car's OBD system, doesn't matter if it's done by bluetooth or serial port.


• Gtk+/Hildon UI:

This user interface is meant for more precise diagnosis. With it we are able to acquire data from all sensors or just a reduced set, record and play the data, perform tests and read fault codes with detailed description.


• SDL (PyGame) UI:

We call this user interface "Rich View". It is mostly used for Gauges visualization and it is highly customizable via XML.

I'm already working on a complete refactoring of the GTK UI. The code is not too bad for my first python project, but it really can be improved a lot. The project is hosted at maemo garage. So, join the mailing lists and report bugs at will. More information can be found in the project web page.

gconf-editor update

Today i took some time to finish the port of gconf-editor to the Maemo platform. This port was mainly done to help the guys working on Canola to set up the application preferences in an easy and straightforward way.

Gconf-editor is an extremely useful application, but it is not recommended to users that don't know what it is all about. So be careful while changing the configuration values. You've been warned. :)

So thanks to Andrunko for the initial debian package and Osvaldo who uploaded the packages to the extras repository. I'll create the entries in the new maemo application catalog page, but if you can't wait for it, the links for the .install files are the following:

• For 770


• For N800

The version is 2.16.0, and I still have to spend some more time on it to polish the patch and submit it to the main tree. But anyway, the source packages are also in the repository.

Finally, there go the screenshots:

• Running on 770



• Running on N800