oh no not another project

Ok, as if I need another project in my life. right now I am trying to ready my home for sale, trying to find a new home, have the home automation project going (I ripped it all out last night.. sad to see my HA gear in a box dormant) as well as my video editing/movie production hobbies running amok in my life.. I have decided to add to the Geo project and create the eGeo. Yes, you guessed it I am going to actually go ahead and start on the car based computing system I have been talking about for the past 4 years. I have looked at the other projects that do the same thing and they all well, being nice efforts and all.... suck horribly. This is a CAR people, you can not treat it like a general use PC. most of the user interface needs to be, no it MUST be extremely simple and easy to deal with.... and when I say easy I mean brain dead easy. The music subsystem needs to be a service running in the background with the controls as a part time interface. Hell actually EVERY piece of software in an auto needs to be able to run in the background and talk to it's user interface when the user wants it to or it is a critical need to take over the screen, I.E. navigation software needs to display a new route information, low fuel alert, etc....

I have seen a 20% increase in engine performance with the changes made on the engine swap. the carchip shows that the engine load is 20% less than it was previousally over the same route at highway speeds. This was using the lighter crank pully that was on the newer engine and replacing the exaust with a free-flow exaust setup, otherwise it's simply a newer engine so therefore it may be mostly that. Expected MPG is to increase by at least 5-6mpg I will not know for sure until I run a couple of tankfulls through the car. I will also be switching to mobil 1 full synthetic after a few tankfulls to see if there is any advantages there as well as switching the manual transmission oil to the GM syncromesh synthetic instead of a regular 75w90 gear oil that is typically in these manual tranny's. NOTE: change that transmission OIL! the manual says to do it every 35,000 miles and typically it is never done. you can do it yourself, the drain plug is on the bottom and the speedometer cable gearhead is the fill hole. the transmission shifts like new with cheap-old $2.00 a bottle 75w90 in it, the old oil came out like it was black tar.. so I am going to change it again in 5000 miles in hopes that it will carry out some left over gunk.

I am also running 1000 mile oil changes for the first 2000 miles in an attempt to clean the engine out completely. those engine flush products are complete crap and do major damage to seals and your other engine surfaces. (crank bearings rely on a thin film of oil in there, the LAST thing you want to do is wash it out.) so highly accelerated oil changes with a DETERGENT oil is the best thing... yes, I cleaned things out first by hand when I tore apart the bottom end of the engine, but there is still little bits of good hiding that only this will get rid of.

Increasing the air pressure in the tires to "simulate" the low rolling resistance tires does help fuel economy, I still can not find out how much, it must be minimal and that could be because there is a property that I can not simulate with overinflation. adjusting the front end alignment to be near zero does give a increase in MPG, but severely reduces steering stability. this is not suggested in any way due to safety. The honda insight has some steering dampening and stabalization that the geo does not have to compensate.

those are my updates so far, more to come and possibly pretty graphs showing the engine load data I have been collecting.

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