Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Carduino, more from the brainstorm...

I have another idea which will be easier to implement in the short term and enable me to put together some of the systems I need to accomplish the larger task.

I want to make a CO2 economiser which will turn the car engine off and back on again when sitting in traffic.

Because the Land Rover clutch is so heavy and Paris is so full of BLOODY TRAFFIC LIGHTS!!!! I habitually shift into neutral when waiting in traffic. I also often switch the motor off entirely, especially if there is a little down grade towards the lights because I can often roll most of the way instead of sitting with the engine running.

So, I need to detect the car's speed to see if the thing is moving, I need to detect the revs to see if its at idle, I need to cut the fuel to stop the car and I need to see if I have put my foot back on the clutch so it can restart again.

For this I need a sensor for the engine revs which can come from the tacho. I need a relay on the electric solenoid diesel fuel cutoff to stop the motor and a relay for the starter motor.

I bought a couple of reed relays this week and I will start looking into the logistics.

Meanwhile, I have an app key from the nice folks over at Pachube so I can start putting a web-service on my Arduino and creating an interface.

I really want to see if the Pachube system can serve up WSDL so that I can easily write a nice application using Visual Studio 2010 directly for the web-service reference and resulting API import.

While Microsoft applications are lovely on a client or web think how much more loveley it would be to create such a tightly integrated system with a web service running a car engine!

Its so cool I'm positively shivering!

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