I just bought a Toyota and all I want to do is tear it apart to figure it out

That is the nature of a person who has my job, technology is often opened up and the put back together again.  I have owned a 2008 Prius since 2008 and have loved the car.  Now that my Mother in Law needs a replacement for her car, my wife wants to give her my Prius and let me buy a new one.  Say no more!  I found a deal and bought one.  It was expensive, but with a recent windfall I had the money, so technically it is a birthday present from my deceased Mother, plus the $4000 from the government rebates.  But the BIG deal was the HOV tags, I get to drive in the HOV lanes till 2015 all by myself!  Now that is worth money.

So could you write an app that would show up on your console in your car?  It has apps.  How do you build apps for it, now I am motivated to find out more about the application process for the Entunes system.

Charging the car, could this be a source for an app, let’s look at how that works (this is something you need to do when you are building a software application):

It is Pluggable because you plug into the wall and it charges the battery, if the car salemen was correct it is a one amp charge.  If that is true, then that seems low, 3 hours at 1 amp is 360 Watts which is about 1/2 of a horsepower.  So I got to do more research on that to determine the amount of current or amperes while charging does it take.

And at the same time look at one of the potential “apps” that controls the charging time and length of time which I think it is included the more expensive model, which I didn’t get, I got the lowest cost model.

Opportunity:

Then this is the opportunity: Entunes doesn’t support Windows Phone 7 at this time, a drill down is definitely needed here..  Oh well, hopefully, it will come along soon, and if it doesn’t I am going to continue to report on the progress.  This might be a feature set for an later Windows Operating System. 

Fortunately, the car works fine without the Entunes being used through a phone, the GPS works fine, XM works fine (but will I pay for it?), and so forth.  The fascinating charging displays are all I really care about, the Entunes is definitely secondary for me, I don’t eat out much, I still use the paper newspaper to find a movie to watch, as you might guess I am not dating much these days.  So I won’t be able to check my stocks and weather through my center screen while driving, that is a good thing, I am safer that way, a concern my wife of 30 years was worried about.

With the 3 months of free XM, I am enjoying that.  The USB power port is all I need.  But if you have one of the phones that works with Entunes then it looks to be awesome. 

Now let’s take a step back from this and take a look at what kind of operating system that Toyota and Ford might be using in their cars.  Although this is not a statement that Toyota or Ford is using the following O/S, but is an example of one you could use in an automobile or automobile based system that you would design for a senior project:

Windows Automotive 5.0 and 5.5

Now I have to connect this with Windows 8, Azure and maybe Dynamics CRM, which is fairly easy to do:

1. You would create an app that works with an automotive system, this requires that the manufacturers open their systems to the public.  I hope you are understanding that the auto manufacturers have to be very careful about allowing people to hack into their systems since a failure could result in the death of the drivers and passengers.  But let’s say you want to use the Audio system or maybe add an alarm system, then this O/S would be a good idea.  Make sure to include a way to access the internet SECURELY.  You can test this system using any hardware that can run the AUITK, which is any Intel computer that you can boot from.  So in this case you could design something would work with emergency systems for example such as fire departments.  Or if you want to people to really hate you, but make a lot of money off of: Parking Enforcement, rake in the money and not tell anyone what you do, this is one you want to scale out carefully.

2. On the Internet use Azure to implement a mobile system similar to the Azure Mobile sites:

Rock-solid platform

3. Tie the Azure mobile to Windows 8 applications.

4. Study the CAN (Controller Area Network) at, this makes for an interesting paper for High School Digital Media Classes and would be freaky awesome senior project for college seniors*:

*Why is this freaky awesome?  It shows that you are capable of creating a networking tool using specifications and then consume the sensor outputs from a vehicle.  Aerospace jobs need this, medical jobs need this, automotive design jobs need this and so forth.  So in my opinion it is freaky awesome!

Conclusion: Really cool cruising down to the beach on battery with the A/C on, cause if you run out of battery the car automatically switches to gas like a regular Prius (and the super nice thing is that I don’t pay any road taxes for the Electric component!)  But se