Thursday, March 31, 2016

First Official Knight O.S. In Car Test



WoW! Yesterday when I posted this I was so stoked to FINALLY get this project off of the work bench, which in my case was the dining room table, lol I'll bet I must drive my sweetie nuts sometimes ;) She's a trooper and so totally supportive. <3

But yeah, yesterdays test in the car went pretty much as expected, even though I am always more than a little nervous whenever I am using a 5V system to trigger a 12V system especially using the USB port from a computer via the Arduino Micro Controller to do so. Proper isolation between these different power distribution systems is important so you just KNOW it's something you don't want to muck up, you want to definitely make sure you have your connections right. Otherwise kiss the USB port on the computer goodbye or worse ;) So after a little while of going over everything and making sure I had all the correct polarity and isolation, which with this project is pretty simple to do and all components are well isolated, even the final triggering of the relays to turn on various devices is another step of isolation on the switch side of the relay as your 5V trigger from the Arduino simply activates the relay coils. So yes yesterdays test was a great success. I have been waiting to get this to the next level like this for what feels like forever but as you can see the project is coming along in leaps and bounds and getting ever closer to being completed. Once the Voice recognition part of the project is done we can focus more on the correct screen resolution we need for the correct touch screens for K.I.T.T. and work out a great small compact yet powerful computer system to run this on. Mick is working on a boot loader and installer for our application too so the final product is going to be super sweet. :D

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

March 16, 2016 Manual Override Function

Non User Interactive Status Screens

Through the Knight O.S. Knight Rider dash software we even have some non user activated screens that are not activated through the interface itself but can be activated by either the Switch Pod or Upper Console buttons of the users choice through the Arduino Micro Controller interface. Or these system status screens can be activated by K.I.T.T. himself. ;)