A follow up to the progress in FAQ form:
Any response from the manufacturers?
Yes. and Unfortunately:
Dear Mr. me,
Thank you for contacting Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
We
apologize, as we do not send samples of any of our products for
research. Thank you fro your interest in our company and technology.
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and we are sorry we cannot be of more assistance.
If we can be of further assistance, please feel free to contact us www.toyota.com/help/contactus.html.
Sincerely,
.....Some Chic.......
Toyota Customer Experience
What's the electronic architecture of the vehicles like?
We're looking at an embedding of upto 500MB on more than 70 microprocessors connected to the vehicles communication(controller) networks, with roughly 1-2 multimedia bus(s). An embedded linux from scratch solution requires roughly around 4MB ro run properly.
What types of applications are installed on the software that comes with the car?
The main applications installed deal with the vehicle's operation(we'll probably leave the Electrical and Electronic Engineering students to work on these API - depending on the type of vehicle it involves calculating floating point values for underlying control models, effective scheduling cyclic activities and validating simulated control laws) but there's also the multimedia and telematic applications(readily available on opensource based on GTK+ UI toolkits). All these are accessible from the in-dash VDU.
Why are the applications in Japanese?
Because, the imported cars coming in we're previously made for the Japanese market and the first owner probably had no problem navigating through the applications.
What should we be looking for, to understand how it all works?
The VDU should be connected to another systems unit that houses the microcontrollers with dedicated microprocessor(s) - with ROM and RAM support, still on the dash-board.
I'm floating.
Ok. Sarah Conner has to destroy every single body part of the terminator modules sent out from the future to kill her son. Why? because the terminator's multiprocessor architecture allows it to regenerate from any part of the dedicated coprocessors located around its body. What we're trying to do here, is access the microprocessor responsible for translating all visual information received from it's eyes, into machine language. That microprocessor is obviously somewhere on that 888's head, and near those glowing red eyes.
I'm still floating.
Ok. abort the thread. :-)
We've taken the VDU out and the system's unit that goes with it, now what?
I have no idea, yet - we need a way to access the processor and memory subsystem so that we can upload the embedded linux solution..... ANY IDEAS? *Gasp!