When I woke up this morning and turned off my alarm, my Nokia E63’s LED light was on. Now I don’t recall turning it on, but I assume I did so before I went to bed. It was on for roughly 7 hours, and took the battery down from 6 bars to 2. Not bad form if you ask me.
Instead of replacing the head unit of my car I decided to rather just get an FM Transmitter. I ended up with a cheap one from ebay, one that looks like this. It has a USB port to charge things from and a 3.5mm male audio jack to plug into MP3 players, cellphones etc. The only problem, is that the cigarette lighter in my car is located just infront of the gear lever, this gets in the way and the wires there annoy me.
This got me itnerested in building it into the car. I eventually decided to make use of one of the “button” covers in the row of buttons. I have two blanks, so went about mutilating it to achieve my goal. It wasn’t as easy as I had hoped, the blank has a hole lot of junk on the back, but I sawed and ground it off to be left with just the right amount of space to mount a button, a female 3.5mm audio jack and an indicator LED.
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Original Blank on the right, and my modified one on the left, hot glue and all
I trimmed the power lines going to my radio just behind it, and added two connectors so I could easily plug in and remove the fm transmitter if need be. It’s more convenient and also a bit safer/neater than soldered wires all over the place.
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I added two wires with clips from the radio’s wiring harness for power.
One unfortunate thing, is the way I put everything together, it required me to push the FM transmitter through the hole of cover. This was problematic as it was too large. In the end I discarded majority of the case, and wound some insulation tape around the circuitry just to protect it. Not what I had wanted, and not particularly neat, but it works.
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Neatly in place above the radio. USB, LED (off), 3.5mm audio plug and power button visible
Hooked it all up and it’s up and running. The FM transmitter is a cheap one, not that great quality and only transmits on 2 set frequencies, but it does the job. I have found however that the 5V it supplies for USB isn’t that great. My GPS doesn’t seem to like charging from it, although my cellphone is fine. I think the current may be rather limited, so may look into repacing that part of circuitry at some stage.
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With a GPS plugged in to charge and the 3.5mm audio plug in as well. LED On
A while ago while researching a new toy, my Garmin Nuvi 200, I found a neat way to get my model, and several others, to log the route you followed. It’s a slight hassle but works fairly nicely, see instructions below. but the other day I was searching through my Garmin and happened upon a file by the name of “Current.gpx” with a second file “1.gpx” in an archive folder. Both were gpx files so I quickly imported them into Google Maps to take a look.
Now after I’d had a look, I went and looked for the same files on my Dad’s GPS, a Garmin nuvi 350, and found the same files. His files just contained a marker with each of his favourites which then popped up all over Google Earth, mine however contained a very detailed history of every journey I had ever made while my Garmin was on. On one side I thought this was pretty cool, on the other hand I wondered how many people out there are selling there GPSs with thousands of kilometres of driving history sitting on them. It’s quite fun to actually look at the routes. In Google Earth you can select each “route” or section of time while your Garmin was online, so each journey say. Then you can generate a cool altitude, speed vs time graph, and follow it around your route.
After thinking about it a bit and checking out my archive file, it seems that it only activated this “feature” after I used the hacked method to get it to log my single route, so I don’t think it’s anything for people to worry about, perhaps just to keep in mind.
To activate the custom tracking method, you must have locked signal and be looking at the map. Click “Menu”, then “Tools”, then “Where am I?”. Click once on the writing under “Nearest Address” then twice on the text under “My Location” then once again on the text under “Nearest Address”. This should bring up another menu with the options “Start Playback” and “Start Recording”. Click start recording. Two things you will notice. The screenshot button automatically turns itself on (you can turn it off in the menu if you want) and there is a large stop button at the top of the screen. Click that when you want to stop recording your moves. You may notice that there is a timer, it doesn’t tick every second, so if you’re unsure whether it’s working or not, you just have to wait a bit till it ticks over, often jumping several seconds at a time.
To get your data you need to plug your GPS into a PC and go on to the Garmin nuvi drive. Open the Garmin folder and then the Logs folder. Here you will find dated folders with all your logs. The gps.bin file is the one that contains your data.
To convert this into something a bit more usable you are going to need to download a program called Nutrak. This program will generate a GPX file for you which can be opened with Google Earth and various other programs.
Note: I believe by recording your moves once, it activates the automatic recording of every journey you ever take, ever.
Note2: I managed to find the post where I originally discovered this, he also gives nice pictured instructions, you can check it out here. Fairly old hack.
I got a new phone today, yay! Cellphone contract ended last month, and wanted to switch from MTN to Vodacom but was going to end up being such a mission that I just gave up and am going to stick it out with MTN for another 24months. The upside of this is my new (although it’s a relatively old phone) Nokia E63. Basically the big brother of my previous Nokia E51.
Now the point of this. USB mini is a great port, it has been used on practically everything electronic, it’s great, I love it, so why have Nokia decided to stick silly little flimsy USB-Micro ports on their new phones? A cable I do not own, and will now wait a bit before buying. I’m probably just being illogical, or not thinking this through, but I just find it annoying, and why can’t everyone just use the same cable?
Then I remembered having read a few years ago that all the big Cellphone Manufacturers had gotten together and decided to unify the chargers they use on their cellphones. According to this article, this is supposed to be done by 2012. That’s great! Then I read on to see that they have chosen the USB-Micro plug as the weapon of choice for charging all cellphones from then on. Sigh. But I guess yay for unity.
In any case, I thought great! My phone has a USB-micro port, that obviously means that Nokia have gotten over their fear of allowing their cellphones to charge via USB and I’ll be able to charge my phone via USB. Borrowing a cable from a friend proved that my faith in Nokia was unnecessary as they have once again disappointed.
I don’t have much to say, seeing as I have set it up almost exactly as a larger clone of my previous phone, based on the same Symbian OS. It may just be in my mind, but it does seem to react slightly faster. I do however feel that their ability to have more than one “Home Screen” is the biggest waste of time ever. They’ve also put the asterisk, zero and hash keys on the right hand side of the what would normally be a standard numpad, a bit frustrating, but seeing as I am starting for the first time with a QWERTY keypad on a cellphone, I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
For the moment I’m downloading new Firmware for it, so we’ll see how that goes.