Notices

It's a Sandisk, and was £85 UK Pounds, which worked out at just twice the cost of 2 sandisk 16GB cards.

Granted they are more expensive than unbranded cards, but 32Gb was one thing I missed from my N800.

So, you all prefer to have a hassle every time you get into the car :nod: Or, at least that's what I consider it is to put the phone in the cradle every time I enter the car. That's what I do now, and in the previous car I didn't have to do that. To put the phone in the cradle is more hassle than I need. The other way was better. And a solution that rarely ever used to stutter on the previous setup someone had, is hardly recommendable.

My solutions can't be tried, they rely on functionality that are not there... My suggestion is to use Samba, NFS, UPnP or the like over an ad hoc network to give a car device access to your cell phone music collection, without a need to turn any device on or hook it up. A solution that requires as little manual setup every time you enter the car, as your car radio does. It is a description of how much easier it could have been, using current day technology, if it had been implemented in our devices.

Are you confusing my descriptions of poor implementations with suggested solutions?

Your way to do it, just hook it up and put it in a cradle, is - as I write in the first post - IMO more hassle free than A2DP when it's working as poorly as I've come to expect, more hassle free than using the FM transmitter. But it's still a bunch of steps that has to be done manually when you enter the car.

I have described a scenario where you do NOT have to go through any steps when you enter the car. No plugging. No taking the phone out of the pocket. No minimizing the browser to get to the media player. Just turn the key and your music collection is instantly available.

Adhoc? Battery accidentally lasting all day: solved!

Seriously, UPnP is fine, but the car (with loads of power to spare) should be running an AP so the battery powered devices can use powersaving. It's no harder to select an infrastructure connection than an adhoc one; both will require user interaction on the phone, which you don't want, or waiting for the next wifi scan (up to 5 minutes or more). So I'd say drop a $20 AP in your car, wired for power when the ignition is on... maybe add a timer relay to let all devices wrap up comms and disconnect peacefully before the network dies.

Why not let the fixed N8x0 device double as AP? The idea is to do as little as possible connecting/disconnecting the devices, so the N8x0 would normally be connected to the car power. When it's off, it's off. When it's on, it has external power.

I don't think we have a softap driver for the internal wifi, but a USB wifi stick with a mac80211-based driver should work.

Oh, I didn't know we'd need specific drivers for that.

Well, took another look at some of the components here.

Installed UPnP on the N900 using Rygel. The music collection turned up in both X@Windows XPTE and on the N810. Plays in the default media player. So, the N8x0 working as a stationary UPnP player with the N900 being the UPnP server - check.

Now I've started looking into hibernation variations, currently browsing many theads about subjects like suspend to drive. There has been some activity around it on this forum [as some previously active in this thread probably would remember from having been a part of it] and elsewhere (for ARM).

Even if I get suspend to drive/hibernate to work, it'll still require a trick or two before the device hibernates and wakes on charger power off/on. But with the pointers from qwerty12 over there, I believe it's quite possible.

Honestly, I believe qwerty12 can get more out of a Maemo device than Nokia ever envisioned. They should hire him. :B