EVO4G Internet Radio Box

With my ongoing adventures trying to discover what this EVO 4G can do for me, my next endeavor involves beefing up my car stereo. You see, my car is rather outdated so it lacks an auxiliary port where you can hook up your mp3 player to. I recently got tired of listening to the radio stations around town while in the car, so I had to come up with something else. The stereo deck is so old that it can't even play mp3 CDs. Audio CDs can only hold up to 80 minutes of music while mp3 CDs can hold up to many hours of music. Mp3 players with internal memory can hold up to months of music. However, there's no way I could hook up my mp3 player to the car stereo without an auxiliary connection. Fortunately, that's really not the case!


Enter the Griffin iTrip. It allows you to hook up any device with a headphone jack into its FM transmitter. You set the frequency that you want it transmitting on and then set the same frequency on your car stereo and BAM, your stereo is now playing whatever your mp3 player is playing. It's pretty easy. The FM transmitter is powered by your car's cigarette lighter so you have a source of power there. So what about the power for your mp3 player, you ask (for those long road trips)?



Enter the Griffin iTrip's built in USB charger. All of a sudden, you have power for everything! hahaha



This is where the creativity comes in. Not only can you use your EVO for an mp3 player, but you have the power of the internet in your hands as well. One of the greatest inventions spawing out of the internet era is internet radio. I can listen to radio stations like KROQ (106.7) in Los Angeles or The End (107.7) in Seattle from my car in Omaha though my EVO 4G. You have just transformed your average car stereo into an internet radio box. For those of you who listen to Pandora, now you can listen to it while driving in the car.


I listen to BBC Radio 1 in the UK.


The only drawback is that in more populated cities, it may be hard to find a free FM frequency for you to transmit on. However, for long road trips where you are driving out in the middle of nowhere, it is perfect!

More Adventures With The EVO 4G

The HTC EVO had a good 4G reception sitting on top of the GT5 Collectors Edition box...Coincidence? Perhaps...

If you have been keeping up with my previous EVO 4G posts, I have been trying to discover new uses for this magical phone from the future. So far, I have used it effectively as a heads up display and a GPS data logger for automobile racing.

Yesterday, I went over to my friend Jason's house to play a game known to many people as GT5. Long story short, our DSL internet connection in the friendly city of El Monte isn't really up to par with the cable internet that other cities can afford. The 680MB game update would have taken a week on El Monte's DSL service.

I have tethered my HTC EVO 4G before into my laptop for concept testing a few weeks back. Now was the EVO's chance to prove itself worthy of an epic tether. Although El Monte overall has crappy DSL, it has a few isolated pockets of 4G coverage all over North El Monte. We found a comfortable spot in his living room that had a beacon of 4G coverage and commenced tethering the phone to his Apple Powerbook laptop. Success. The Powerbook was now connected to the internets via a 4G data stream. Next we converted his Powerbook into a router and connected it to the Playstation 3 via an ethernet cable. The next part was a bit tricky. The PS3 had trouble logically connecting to the makeshift 4G router but with the help of the internets, we discovered that we needed to enable "Internet Sharing" in the Powerbook via the control panel and then had to do the following:

OS X 10.5:

1. Start Internet Sharing if it's not already running.
2. In Terminal, type cp /etc/bootpd.plist /tmp/bootpd.plist
3. Stop Internet Sharing.
4. Open /tmp/bootpd.plist for editing using TextEdit or whatever.
5. Locate this section of the file, near the end:

   reply_threshold_seconds
   4

6. Change the value 4 to 0.
7. In Terminal, type sudo cp /tmp/bootpd.plist /etc
8. Start Internet Sharing.
9. If you want to, check that your change to /etc/bootpd.plist hasn't been reverted.

Finally, after an hour of fan-dangling, the PS3 was well on its way updating this fabled game known as GT5. So how long did it take to download a 680MB update while speed testing the connection and doing some light browsing? Less than 25 minutes....

Lessons learned:
1.) The interwebs are very powerful.
2.) The HTC EVO 4G is either from the future or has been reverse engineered from Area 51 Alien technology.
3.) 4G gobbles battery power similar to college students guzzling beer during happy hour...While the phone is tethered via USB, it is also charging the phone's battery. However with 4G enabled, the 4G data link almost over powers the battery charging. I commenced battery charging at 25% battery life with the 4G data link enabled to keep my laptop internet radio stream and pidgin service alive for 8 hours while I slept. When I woke up, the battery was charged to 28%.

Fall Radio Show

To make things a bit more interesting this fall, I took up a volunteer job working at the local university radio station. It was quite fun to say the least. My favorite part of the whole deal was operating all of their ghetto equipment. The radio station is so poor that we can't really afford anything fancy. Anyways, I ended my semester with a really cool visit from one of Omaha's best club DJs. You can watch the interview and follow on performance below. I edited the video down to only 5 minutes because the entire session was over an hour. A radio show is meant to be listened to instead of being watched since there is really nothing to see that's super cool. The full podcast is available upon request.

Interview


Edited Session

Jasper Johns 3 Flags with real flags

So this would be a fun project to do. Basically, take the idea of the painting "3 Flags" by Jasper Johns and transform with real flags. In the painting, Johns seemed to have used the same proportions for each flag. In my project I will use flags of 2 proportions since they don't seem to make the middle sized flag in the right dimensions.

Here is a rendition of how Johns' piece looks in comparison to what mine will look like in real life.

Jasper Johns


What mine should look like in real life (done in Photoshop)

The largest flag is 4x6.
The medium flag is 3x5.
The smallest flag is 2x3.

The largest and smallest essentially are the same proportion. However, the medium would have to be 3x4.5 ft to fit the scheme. I couldn't find that size so 3x5 is the next best thing.

I'm probably going to use double sided tape to stick the flags onto each other. Also, what you want to do is fold the white part of the flag (the part that attaches to a pole) in so it looks more like the picture.

2 extra stars ftw!!

Omaha with it's Christmas Mod Pack

Although I do miss the ocean breeze and coastal landscapes, I do like Omaha because it is a beautiful city at night. This is a shot of downtown Omaha after it got all dolled up for the holiday season.

The Adventures With The EVO 4G Continues: Heads Up Display

As I continue to discover the powers of my magical phone, here is my latest experiment: a portable heads up display for your car!

GPS Data Logging on the HTC EVO 4G

A while back, I swapped in my old Nokia 3390 for an HTC EVO 4G running the Android OS. Since then, I have been trying to figure out some of the various capabilities of this new phone (other than making fancy phone calls) and the different things I can do with it. This is the first major capability experiment for the phone.

Specifically, it is a test of the phone's GPS data logging abilities. Using the GPS capability embedded within itself, it can log speed and elevation, along with latitude and longitude. There is a bit of lag between the actual speedometer and the GPS speedometer due to the refresh rate of the GPS unit. I think excessive vibrations also affect the way it is reading. The car vibrates like crazy at high speeds. Due to the refresh rate and vibrations, there seems to be some sporadic spiking in the data readouts when I introduce drastic speed changes. Overall, the GPS data logging capabilities of the phone works great.

This was also a test of my external microphone, piped from my on-board camera directly into the engine compartment. This is what the raw sound of a 1.5L 1NE-FE Toyota engine (pushing a bit over 100HP) sounds like at full power!

Vroom...Vrooom.... :^P

My next big experiment will be using the accelerometer embedded in the phone to measure lateral G forces acting on the vehicle during a high speed turn. I will also try to add this to the overlay.

For specific technical details on this experiment, feel free to ask and I will explain it over a cup of coffee....