Introduction
Many of you know it for a long time, high tech and fast cars is something I am into a lot, of course besides normal things like eating, drinking and another thing I won’t talk about. Due to these strong interests and the fact that the Internet or the Cyberspace means a whole lot to me, I was very excited when I got the chance to take part in a project that would combine a fast car, high tech PC-equipment and Cyberspace together. Tom’s Hardware Guide is proud to represent a part in the development of a ‘thing’ that is simply called ‘Megacar’, and although it may only be available to a very small minority of my readers due to its price, I’d still like to explain the technique behind this overkill-vehicle.
Online Access via a Mobile Phone Doesn’t Cut the Mustard
Many people in the PC as well as the media business travel a whole lot with their car and there are quite a lot of times when you would have the need to go online, either because you’re heavily commuting and thus simply wasting your precious time or when something really urgent came up and you cannot get to a cyber-terminal fast enough. Today, in the age of mobile telecommunication we can at least use our mobile phone to get ‘some’ kind of Internet-connectivity, but the 9.6 kbit/s offered by mobile phones are light years from today’s state of the art. Even the cheapest modems using a terrestrial line can offer at least 33.6 kbit/s, which is 3.5 times as much as what the expensive mobile phone is able to provide. Thus uploads of large files, as e.g. photos, browsing the web and particularly video conferencing are things that are merely impossible when you are on the road.
Why Not 16 Mobile Connections In Parallel?
Dataprotect realized the same problem and so we sat down together and thought about a way to provide a decent bandwidth to a computer that’s used in a car on the road, at the same time putting financial worries aside for the time being. We came to a simple equation. If one mobile phone provides only 9.6 kbit/s, why not using 16 of them in parallel to get 153 kbit/s? This may sound crazy, but the cyber-equipment of ‘Megacar’ does exactly that.
Facing the Problems
The way from the above idea to the final prototype was long and took a whole lot of work. Lot’s of questions needed to be addressed, many problems to be fought. How would we distribute the typical TCP/IP-packets to the 16 different mobile connections without serious synchronization problems? How to make sure that there’s no packet loss on these touchy lines? How to deal with the typical transmission errors? How would 16 phones work in one car? Would 16 phones mean 16 different aerials on the car and wouldn’t they interfere with each other? Could 16 phones work on less than 16 aerials? How can the router system be saved from heavy shocks whilst driving? Those problems needed to be sorted out to make the connectivity possible, but after solving those there were some more questions coming up. Would the bandwidth in the car be made available to simple notebooks or should the car have a dedicated PC inside? How could this system meet highest performance expectation of people who would spend the significant amount of money this system would cost?
Megacar, a Mega Car
First of all a car had to be chosen. To justify the name ‘Megacar’, which I think is a slight bit over the top and mainly explainable by the youth and the slightly excessive nature of the project leader Kim Schmitz, the car was not supposed to be a normal automobile available to the masses, but nothing less than a ‘Brabus 5.8’. This car is based on the new Mercedes S500, but its engine is increased to 5.8 liter, thus providing 400 bhp. The Brabus 5.8 has no speed limitation and reaches a high speed of 170 mph, it has a modified suspension, special interior, four television/video screens, a S-VHS video recorder, DVD-player and many more things. The price of the base car makes ‘Megacar’ unfortunately already unaffordable to 99.999% of the people.
That’s what it looks like, the ‘megaCar’.
The ‘phones’ used inside the car are 16 GSM-modules, using the European/Asian digital mobile phone standard that’s today also found in several places in the US, e.g. the San Francisco Bay Area, where it’s called ‘PCS’.
In this picture you can see the 16 GSM-modules and the Cyclades Z-Box above it.
Those 16 modules are connected to a GSM-booster, which distributes those 16 aerial-connections to two physical aerials on the roof of the car, providing a send/receive-power of 2W to each of the GSM-modules.
Instead of the reserve tire, you find the GSM-booster and an additional battery.
The Secret Is the Special Multiplexing Software
On the other end, the 16 GSM-modules connect to a Cyclades Z-Box, which supplies each GSM-module with a serial port that connects to a router/proxy-PC. The GSM-modules are operated via common AT-commands over the serial connection by this PC. The router/proxy processes the most difficult task of this system, it runs the software that multiplexes the data to the 16 ‘mobile telephone lines’. This software was by far the toughest work, but the specialists from DataProtect were able to eliminate all the occurring difficulties. The router/proxy runs under Linux and is equipped with a Pentium MMX 233, 64 MB RAM, 32 MB FlashCard, replacing a shock sensitive hard drive, a FastEthernet card, the Cyclades card that connects to the Z-Box and a floppy for software upgrades. Behind the router/proxy is a FastEthernet switch, which provides full Internet services to the network inside the car.
On the right you can see the router/proxy PC and the car’s CD-changer on top of it, the book-size Mitac-PC is on the left and a S-VHS video recorder above it.
Real Time Video Conferencing with Three Cameras
Built into the car are already two systems that connect to this Internet proxy. One of them is a video conferencing system that connects to three special mini CCD cameras, one in each front seat headrest facing the back seats and one adjustable wide-angle camera behind the back seats facing the front passengers and the windscreen. The video conferencing system is able to provide 30 fps with high sound quality and you can switch between the different cameras remotely via special software, to see who is in the car and where it is heading.
And a High End PC with a 17.3″ Screen
The other system is a high-end PC. This PC is based on a Mitac book-size PC, equipped with a BX-motherboard, a Pentium III 500, 256 MB of memory, a sound card that connects to the car’s Bose sound system, a FastEthernet card, a IBM 18 GB 2.5″ very shock resistant notebook hard drive, a Floppy and CDRom, a FireWire card and a NumberNine Revolution IV that connects digitally to a SGI 17.3″ flat panel, which folds down from the car roof. The keyboard used is a wireless keyboard with built-in touchpad. You can imagine that this system is far beyond any notebook, it offers full Pentium III 500 computing power and you can use a huge screen at a resolution of 1600×1024.
Inside the car you can additionally connect up to two notebooks to the car’s network via a FastEthernet connection and you can hook up digital cameras or camcorders to the FireWire connectors inside the car as well.
The Cyber-Equipment of MegaCar in Short
I made a graphic for those of you who prefer pictures to dry text:
Megacar’s Cyber-Specs
Click to see this slide in your screen resolution:
I guess that this car provides as much high-tech as what’s currently available and possible. The cyber equipment should satisfy the expectations of anyone who needs a PC with high bandwidth Internet-connectivity and/or real-time video-conferencing inside his car. The cyber-equipment is not only available in this Brabus-car, it can be built into any other car as well.
The other side of the medal is the price of $295.000 for the whole car or at least $90.000 for the cyber-equipment. It will make this system unavailable for most of us, including myself for the time being. The price will be fair enough for those though, who think that a 150 kbit/s-line is indeed essential for their car. You could think of governmental cars for example, because due to GSM and the special multiplexing software the connection is also uninterceptable.
For more pictures and information take a look at www.megacar.com
