We’re back in the swing of things for 2018, looking forward to Spring! 🌱 🌷 Since we’re not quite there yet, I’ll try and keep your mind busy with the next Meeting of the Minds topic for March! Vehicles today are more advanced than ever with sophisticated chassis control, automated driving aids, and even more fuel efficient drivetrains. More and more of the components whose only possibility for improvement depended on turning a wrench or swapping out parts can now be customized through changing some bits in the ever-growing number of computerized controllers that are onboard.
Alright, alright, so we’re going to learn how to adjust fuel injection parameters and spark advance curves? Nope, instead we’re going to focus on an area of vehicle customization that has been out of reach in times past. General Motors (and perhaps others) now offers a development SDK for creating custom applications that run on the built-in touchscreen infotainment systems in newer cars. Best of all, you develop these applications using open technologies such as Node.js! 😎 Check it out on their site for Next Generation Infotainment.
Join us at 6:30pm on March 1st, 2018 in the Conference Room at Third Space Coffee House in Bonner Springs, KS. I’ll be giving a demo of this system along with a proof-of-concept application (source code will be available on our Github page afterwards). It should be an entertaining (that part is on me) presentation and discussion (this part is partially on all of you), so come and join the fun!
We’re also back in action with our sponsor for Meeting of the Minds, JetBrains s.r.o.. We have a drawing each session for a free license to one of their great IDE’s or development tools. You should really check them out–especially if you want to get your dev on. 😉
Alright, I better get to coding.
–Kevin Collins