tuner on 8.9"screen

[62f100]

looking into getting new laptop,a asus eee pc 901 20g the screen is 8.9".how will this screen work with tunerstudio.

[LT401Vette]

Do you know what the resolution is?
Really the whole app scales to pretty much any resolution.

The exception to this is in some of the dialogs defined in the ini's that are specific to the firmware. Some of those are very tall and may get a bit squished on less than about 960 pixels in height. But if you run into that it is pretty easy to change the ini for it.

I would like to keep everything working well on those. All those little atom based laptops make great tuning laptops. They are small, light, cheap, fast, good on battery and have solid state drives.

[LT401Vette]

I was looking at some of these. It appears that 1024x600 is common. There are some dialogs on some of the firmwares that will probably get quashed in 600 high, but most should be fine.
For example the "Code base and Output Functions" dialog in MS1 Extra. That is pretty tall.

If you find any that give trouble, let me know. That is a simple ini file tweak. Those little computers are the perfect tuning laptops. Small, light, cheap solid state drives....

I would have already bought one except I already have enough Windows and linux laptops. I really need a mac so I can give proper support to those.

[PlasticPower8500]

It works just fine with 640x480.

Actually what I'm using half the time is a 7" RCA screen (yup, the crappy s-video to rca adapter, not even VGA). I have my laptop docked to a station on the back seat, the screen displays all the information just fine. I can even TUNE the fuel/spark tables, because when you resize them, you can make them full-screen. With a wireless trackball, I can actually make fine adjustments.

What would be nice, is a more touchscreen-friendly approach, like the ability to resize some of the controls (increment/decrement buttons for fuel tables, etc).
But I can't complain, this works for a small screen, even with the most horrible resolution:



I can take the screen off when I'm not using it, that's why I opted for this kind of setup.
For times when you're actually tuning, this is quite useful. Other times the screen is stored in the glovebox

[LT401Vette]

Now that is pretty cool.

It is on the list to put in a better touch screen navigation. I figure even by having the buttons go to down the side and larger images on the menus to increase there side would be a good step. May need to do some ini tweaking on some of the dialogs.

[tapedshoes]

thats AWESOME!! i've been thinking of doing something like this for a while now, using the lcd as a dashboard. What are you using to power the PC? an inverter or a dc-dc power supply?

edit: just saw the laptop detail. still awesome though. Can you see all the digits and readouts on the low-res screen?

[kritip]

I'm also planning something similar. I'm going to build up a miniITX system, as long as it's powerfull engough for tunerstudio, and a vga LCD widescreen panel as a dash (larger and higher res than the one shown). I just need to get a speedo input working first.

Nice to see it in practice

[Kaas]

Phil.

What about making TS working on a windows ce pda? I dont know if it can be done, but it will be very cool if it can!

[LT401Vette]

Phil.

What about making TS working on a windows ce pda? I dont know if it can be done, but it will be very cool if it can!

It might be possible, but the todo list is pretty long it might be a while before I get there

I'm going to build up a miniITX system, as long as it's powerfull engough for tunerstudio,

They have some pretty powerful miniITX's out there, so that isn't a problem. Even if you get one without a lot of power, there are just some considerations. The hardware requirements for TunerStudio vary a lot depending on how you have it set up. The main thing that takes CPU power is the dash when you get fancy. If you run it with a simple dash and anti aliasing off, it takes less CPU power to run than MegaTune. Run some complex gauge setups with anti-aliasing on and CPU usage can rise big time! Orders of magnitude depending on your video chip set.
But something to remember with the carPC's is you have low resolution and less area to add a lot of gauges, so it takes less CPU power to run.

I have had some people assume that it takes more CPU than MegaTune because it is written in Java; when it actually takes the same to less if you run it setup as MegaTune with a the basic default dash without anti aliasing. All the extra bling is what takes more CPU.

Now for memory..... TunerStudio does take more than MegaTune It usually grabs about 30 Meg on startup.

[kritip]

Thats great Phil

I must admit i never compared the two applications, but always presumed it would use a lot more power to run. Perhaps I'll get it on my old laptop to see how it runs

[Nitrobanshee]

Here is what im running TS on

http://www.mini-box.com/VoomPC-2-Car-PC ... tegory=101

It has plenty of power for what ever you what to run, provided you buy enough ram for it.

The main reason that I like TS is that you can run it on anythig that is able to run java.
I have it running on a linux distro that is 20megs + java + tunerstudio + megalogviewer all on a 512MB flash drive.

[LT401Vette]

Nice!
Those Atom processors are great in the low power/heat market. They have plenty of power.

I am really looking to get a setup like that in my Corvette once I get a chance. I've been sort of using all free time for coding though, so the car is kinda neglected. I'll be back on it eventually!

[62f100]

im still try to decide from the asus eee pc900 & acer aspire aoa110-1295,both @ $300.one of these wil replace the old compaq armada 1560dm,mmx 133mhz & 32mb ram.so far i can run a few guages as monitor for engine function.(not running efi yet ,still using carb&dizzy).so yea ts will run on old laptop as long as u dont get to fancy.

[LT401Vette]

compaq armada 1560dm,mmx 133mhz & 32mb ram.so far i can run a few guages as monitor for engine function.

Thanks that is great info... I haven't tested at that level, but want it to work there

I should add OS, make a big difference too. TunerStudio is very Multi-Threaded. The old DOS based windows take a big penalty on Threads as they use pretty make shift support for threads. So even upgrading the OS will improve performance substantially if you are still running on a DOS based windows like win95, win98, win Millennium. But now we are talking about 10 year old laptops, with all these low dollar mini laptops popping up the reasoning behind using old laptops is quickly loosing weight.

[UnaClocker]

I was looking at some of these. It appears that 1024x600 is common. There are some dialogs on some of the firmwares that will probably get quashed in 600 high, but most should be fine.
For example the "Code base and Output Functions" dialog in MS1 Extra. That is pretty tall.

If you find any that give trouble, let me know. That is a simple ini file tweak. Those little computers are the perfect tuning laptops. Small, light, cheap solid state drives....

I would have already bought one except I already have enough Windows and linux laptops. I really need a mac so I can give proper support to those.

Just wanted to add my 2 cents to this one.. Almost all of the Netbooks out right now will run Mac OSX quite nicely. I picked up a Dell Mini9, which is probably the cheapest one you can get (starts at $350, but you'd want to upgrade to at least a 8gb SSD to run OSX). That's what I'd do, if I were you. Very cheap way to have a Mac machine to do your testing on. I can provide you with assistance installing OS X on it as well. Once it's running OSX, as far as ANY app is concerned, and even the OS really, it IS a Mac. There are no application compatibility issues between a true Mac and a Hack.. ;)

[LT401Vette]

Almost all of the Netbooks out right now will run Mac OSX quite nicely.

Really
I'm interested! The Mac OS is pretty picky about the hardware with only drivers for specific hardware, right? These qualify though, I guess.... Give me a hand picking out one that has the right stuff.

[UnaClocker]

I can't recommend the Dell Mini 9 highly enough. Not just because I own one and would be best prepared to help you install OS X onto it. It's also got the best price, the best warranty (Dell is great to work with for support and warranty issues, should you need to). It's the smallest netbook. It has almost normal sized keys. It's well built too. Several other nice points that elude me right now.
Here's a link to it.

[kritip]

Hope I'm not taking this far too off topic but i just tried it on my old tuning laptop.

Processor: Intel Pentium III 700 MHz
Type: L2 Cache - Advanced Transfer Cache
Installed Size: 256 KB
Data Bus Speed: 100 MHz
Chipset Type: Intel 440ZX
Graphics Processor / Vendor: ATI RAGE Mobility M1 AGP
Video Memory: SDRAM - 8 MB
System Memory: 192MB

Running windows 2K.

Latest TS and JRE linked from TS page.

I installed it, and ran the gauge demo with and without anti-aliasing.

Full Screened at 1024x768 it maxes out the processor (100%), anti-alias or not. It doesn't jerk about though, so it may be usable?

About 3/4 screen it sits around 55-70% regardless of anti-aliasing.

Make it tiny (unusable in size) and it sits at about 20%.

Memory usage for java is about 50MB.

I haven't tried it on a running car yet, but am looking forward to it tomorrow, see how it goes tomorrow

[Quan-Time]

I use a via C7 computer and a 800x600 7" touch LCD.. Works fine.. Bit fiddly, but its possible.
I use megatunix for a dash however.

a via C7 is tiny.. how tiny you ask ? the complete motherboard is 12cm square, thats basically the size of a DVD.
look up nanoITX form factor. 1.5ghz, 1gb ram, 16gb compact flash card as a hard drive. Works really well. Boot times are great.

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showt ... p?t=685106

have a look there for info on how small you can go.

[pimpsmurf]

I use an EeePC 701 (4g Surf model)

It's got a tiny little screen, but is quite usable. I just stretch the fonts out with the designer mode for stuff I really need to see.

The only problem I have is using some of the interfaces, such as the accel wizard. What I did was download a program for the EeePC called AsTray+ and it allows scaled, higher resolutions. So I can run 1000x600 and then tunerstudio's stuff all fits on it fine. If you aren't tuning, just watching from that screen, it will be plenty.