Steam on your car dashboard

Following up my post on car driving gamification, I'm going to push it a little further.
Using data from GPS, the car will be able to rate our driving style:
did we drove on that uphill curvy road optimally?
By uploading driving data, it will be possible to compare them with other drivers that drove the same road and crown a real "king of the hill".

Are we going to see Steam on our infotainment systems?

Will we get Steam achievements while driving?

The Reboot Syndrome

Shouldn't reboots be an exclusive feature of Windows-based OSes?
It doesn't seem so.
This morning, while driving, I turned on my Yaris infotainment system with the MODE button on the steering wheel.
It turned on as usual with the FM station tuned in. (Bad design here: it was on the USB player when I turned it off yesterday)
I pressed MODE again to switch to USB and bang!

The screen showed the Hybrid logo of the boot sequence.
After that, it correctly switched to USB.

Note:
QNX should be a crash resistant OS, able to reload only the offending module.
Reboot was really fast, barely the time to think "what's that?" and the system was back on line: however it's not an excuse...

Touch&Go update process

It seems that the Touch&Go system is raising some curiosity. http://haxor.fi/2012/10/how-the-firmware-updates-work-on-toyota-touch-go

Hacking QNX CAR-based Toyota Touch&Go

While I'm waiting for my new Yaris HSD to arrive, I've gathered some info on its infotainment system, the Touch&Go audio and navigation system.

It's based on the QNX CAR platform, and it allows downloading of apps from the Toyota website.
It's a system that just begs to be hacked.

There's a nice quickstart guide on the QNX website: it guides you to install a fully functional develpment environment.

http://www.qnx.com/download/feature.html?programid=20982

It's even available a VMware VM with a full QNX environment where you can test the SDK.

650SP1-VM.tar

The SDK itself is available as an evaluation at http://www.qnx.com/products/evaluation/ (windows and linux flavours).

Here is a little hello world to try:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    printf("Welcome to the QNX Momentics IDE\n");
    system("sleep 60");
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

After the build, the executable is available in

C:\ide-4.7-workspace\my_first_project\x86\o

I shared that directory and mounted it from inside the QNX VM:

mkdir /mnt
fs-cifs //hostname:192.168.237.1:/qnx /mnt user password

Note the redundancy of specifying both the host name and the ip address.
From the /mnt directory it's possible to run the sample on the VM.

Recompiling with arm target should produce an executable suitable for the real platform.
I will continue my experiments when I'll have the real car at hand.

UPDATE:
I've finally got my car.
It seems that the Touch system comes in two flavors:

1. Touch: which performs audio and trip information (energy management and mileage history)
2. Touch&Go: which add navigation and apps to the above.

There's indeed an additional hardware component (the GPS module), but the base system is the same.
I only have the base Touch system, and I'm not going to buy the additional module, because it's simply not worth the price for me.
I don't understand why apps should run only when the GPS module is present and maybe there's a chance to run them even without it.

Is there any volunteer, with a Touch&Go system, that has already downloaded some sample apps like Glass of Water, willing to send me a dump of his USB media?
A simple

dd if=/dev/sdc | bzip2 >usb.dump.bz2

would do (make sure your USB key is /dev/sdc).