I think that we have been wasting alot of the potential of the iphone because of the lack of automation. Almost everyone knows that you can make your iphone automate your house (turn on and off lights, adjust temperature, lock and unlock doors, etc.) using the iphone and many people have seen some of the videos showing how the iphone can be used to unlock, lock, and start your car. If, however, you decide to do any of these you may find, as i did, that while searching you will only find the main "commercial" ways to do these things, which cost alot of money, so i have decided to dedicate this thread to find the cheapest automation tech for the iphone that still works well.

The most well known car automation for the iphone is by far the viper smart start technology, which is sold in almost every best buy. The problem with this is that it costs 500 dollars and then after the first year it costs 30 a year because it works through 3g technology. There are several ways around this, the first being bluetooth. Bluetooth is of course not the best choice because of it's short, spotty range and lack of compatibility with the iphone. So, we move on to our next choice, which i believe would be the best which is to have the car always put out a wifi signal that is not connected through 3g, but just between the phone and computer (computer to computer network) this way, you get the strength of wifi, without the expensive charge of the 3g network.

So now that we know what type of connection we will use, the next question would be what do you want to be able to do? Personally, i know that if i did this, the car i would build it on would be a very old car, so the need for connecting the on board computer to this new computer is gone. I would want to be able to: lock, unlock, start, turn off, adjust temperature (improbable on my older model car) and have my phone be able to wirelessly play the music from it through the speakers on the car (because the old car doesnt have a cd player or aux jack and the radio isnt too good)
Now that we know what we want to do, we need to think of how to do it. Of course, the website geekmyride.com will be very useful because it has all the information about the first car this was done to (mazda rx-8) but this will be different because he too chose to use a 3g server and connect through the internet. So, we would need a computer that draws little power (because it would have to run off of a battery while the car was off) but is powerful enough to do everything we want so far. This computer would have to be running a version of Unix, and would have to have a powerful wireless router, a small but powerfull battery, and of course a homemade circuit board with all the components i want to control attached (starter, locking mechanisms, etc.) but i also want to be able to control everything with the normal key just incase i need to... A touch screen monitor would have to be mounted on the dash to control the computer when i. the vehicle as well... and all the software would have to be written for the iphone and for the car (unless it is built similar enough that the software from geekmyride can be used, which they offer for free)


So anyway, i have absolutely no idea why i typed this, but it feels good to get my thoughts down in type... i almost think i should delete everything i just typed instead of posting because this was mostly for my own benefit to see how realistic the idea is... oh well ill post anyway and maybe someone will have input or find it interesting... you can tell im bored....