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Hi,
It took me several days and finally I have Carman up and running, with the internal GPS fixed. While waiting for my cheap ELM327 bluetooth dongle to arrive, I also tried to activate Info Share.

How:
First I tried through Pidgin as instructed by the developers. I installed it but the necessary Carman-Infoshare-plugin was not there (official name: pidgin-carman). I found out that it was in the diablo distribution of Maemo-Extras repository. I added that repository but when I tried to install pidgin-carman from terminal the response was that this package has become obsolete and replaced by carman-is-plugin. I installed that and launched Carman.

In the Status page I noticed that INFO SHARE was finally marked as 'Disconnected' which meant that it allowed me to go ahead and set it up. This is exactly what the application prompts you to do when you tap and then press ok. Then you are presented with the available protocols to choose from: Yahoo, Jabber and MSN. This is just about where my luck ended. No matter which one I chose, it seemed impossible to login since the keyboard, virtual or not, does not respond. Restarting N900 did not help either.

Has anyone gone that far and experienced the same problem? Perhaps there is a configuration file that we can put the login data in and bypass the interface...

Thank you

I have not yet been able to pair my ELM327 bluetooth OBD2 dongle with my N900 running Carman. You are far out in front!

OBD2 pairing is a another process I suppose. But it is not a prerequisite. Could you please try the INFO SHARE functionality and post your feedback?

It worked! I don't know how it happened but now I can type in username etc. through both keyboards. I managed to connect to 'Info Share' through hotmail.

I've never really wanted to use the Info Share part of Carman, but it's good to know it works.
@ rotoflex: The trick I used to make it work was to pair the dongle with the N900 though it's normal bluetooth discovery/pairing system first. I then went in, connected to it (as it disconnects after pairing), and ran Carman with it already connected. After that Carman was able to see it. Since then, just connecting in Carman turns on bluetooth, finds the dongle and connects.

One note (mentioned here earlier): For some cars you have to have the car actually turned on to pair, for some you have to have it just in "accessory" mode. My smart car has an oddity that you can't clear engine statuses if the car is on, but have to pair while it is on.

Good luck!

Hi
Can carman be set up to use a usb obd11 cable instead of bluetooth for n900.
I also have usb host mode installed

Not sure it's been tried. I'm betting the current version can't, since it's handling enabling and connecting to the bluetooth device itself. There are older versions that talk to a serial port, assuming you've already setup the port for it (be that bluetooth or serial). It probably wouldn't take a lot of work to change the code, but the maintainer has long since dropped not only this project, but the device line as well.

On the up-side, there are lots of other open-source tools for using usb-based dongles. If you can find some that are python or pearl based, they should work fine on the N900 with minor changes.

can someone port the oldest version of carman please?
it does not have any GPS function but the great part is that it shows info for all available sensors of the cars.
the last one
http://openbossa.indt.org/carman/ins...ldversion.html

Finally,
All things regarding CARMAN are working just fine, including the cheap CAN OBDII that I just received.

The only problem is that the Bluetooth passkey is 0000 and somehow it crashes when working together with other bluetooth devices (car multimedia etc). In this case it needs to be deleted and re-paired back.

I think I'll order one of the blue OBD-2 adapters, as the ELM one has not been successful for me.