Using display from PDA/iPhone/iPod Touch for car info

[OzBoz]

Just something I was thinking about. It would be very cool if you could use the display (in my case an iPhone) to display data like tire temps etc so while racing.. you put it landscape wise under your screen and you could read all the interesting stuff from your phone.

I know there is a little program that can send the data over network so you can read it on a monitor which is connected to another computer. So creating a kind of client for Windows Mobile devices or iPhone should be possible (I guess).

I'm not a programmer but just wanted to share the idea, maybe there are some other people around with some more programming skills. Or someone knows some great programmers.

I think it would be cool, then again, if you read this and think it's a stupid idea.. tell me

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Sounds like a pretty cool idea since you can attach most pda's with the pc by USB... If would definitly use it if it was possible!

 

[Lee Williamson]

This does sound like a really cool idea - I have an iPod touch, so speaking for that only I know that theres lots of little apps out there that connect to the internet to do all kinds of wierd stuff - I guess it could fetch info from the game server to display!? But then I'm no techie so hopefully someone can enlighten us

 

[Matt Crouch]

Clearly there's a way to get the data out of the game as there are a couple of apps that can do it real time - including one for the G15 keyboard display.

I don't know how these work, it depends on how open the game is, for example trackmania implements its own XMLRPC server which runs whenever you run the game, but the apps for gtr might just be reading values from the memory...

anyway, for any device with wi-fi you would just need to create a server which you could run on your pc to pull the values out of the game (you could skip this part all together if it worked like trackmania), then create a client for the mobile device which could read these values and display them. Not very difficult if you know what you're doing, but quite time consuming. Even more so if writing for more than one device since there are different OSes like Symbian for Nokia and whatever the iPhone uses

As long as you keep it local there shouldn't be much lag between things happening in the game and being displayed on the device.

 

[Matthew Hardwick]

I'd love to be able to use my cellphone as a display. It's probably a difficult thing to program though.