Conversion Details and Final Specs

The base unit is an Acer one AO531h netbook with WWAN modem and the 6 cell extended battery. This is the same unit sold with a data contract at AT&T although this particular unit was a refurb that most likely only had a bad webcam which is why they were returned to AT&T and Acer. So the basic specs are the same except for a few subtractions and additions.

Items Removed:

1. Webcam assembly
2. Keyboard (Which can be replaced if needed)
3.  Touchpad and controller (Like the keyboard it's not accessible in normal use)
4. VGA connector (Replaced with an SMA jack)
5. Ethernet connector  (Replaced with SMA jack

Items added:

1. Touchscreen Kit
2. Bluetooth transceiver (USB Bluetooth dongle stripped and mounted in the provided mount and hardwired to the Bluetooth Port on the motherboard)
3. Wireless Mouse receiver (Another stripped out USB dongle mounted where the touchpad controller used to be)
4. Antenna Jack (SMA) for GPS antennas
5. Antenna Jack (SMA) for Cellular WWAN modem
6. Memory upgraded to 2 GB
7. Windows 7 OS (Without a keyboard with the hardwired Fn key there was no way to control the backlight in XP even with the Tablet PC extensions so Win7 was my best option and properly set up seems just as fast as XP )
8. Power supply circuit modified to run off 12-13.8 VDC **without** battery installed, no noisy auto adapter needed lowering average power consumption to 10 watts or less
9. Four switches added to the front bezel, Power, Bluetooth, WWAN, WLAN wired in parallel with the existing switches which are all still functional


Outboard items mainly wired into my boat:

1. USB Hub in console
2. Rubber industrial grade USB keyboard in console
3. Serial to USB converter in console for serial NMEA depth output of the Garmin 300C fishfinder
4. GPS antenna(s)
5. Cellular 1900MHz Edge band antenna(s)
6 USB port mount in front of console
7. Tough Tray II and Ram Mount mounting hardware
8. PC Shade hood for better daylight visability of the LCD screen
9. Bluetooth headset for Voice Control

GPS related software:

1. Ozi Explorer v 3.95.5k
2. Map Merge for OziExplorer
3. Depths2Ozi
4. Fugawi Marine ENC v 4.5
5. Dr Depth v4.5


Next up some pictures of the unit in the boat and the boat electrical setup

Netbook To Chartplotter V 1.0

First a few pictures then I'll go into the final details

They don't make a touchscreen kit for this particular Acer One model (AO531h) and it is so slim there was really no place to put the touchscreen controller. Since the keyboard was essentially worthless now with the screen flipped like a Tablet PC I removed it and put the touchscreen controller in there. I got a 3-in-1 screen protector, microfiber cloth and mousepad to cushion the LCD screen and chassis when it's in the boat Ram Mount.

The Tough Tray II Ram Mount, wireless mouse and Bluetooth headset for voice control

I was able to just flip the screen and wiring to get it to convert to a Tablet PC for use in my boat without the battery but the battery would bind a bit on the LCD screen when fully closed stressing it so I had to remove a little unnecessary plastic and then covered with quality electrical tape (3M Temflex 1700)

For field GIS type of work like mapping a yet to be flooded lake they are building north of Davenport I can pop in the battery pack, flip the screen 180 degrees and add my custom Cellular data modem and GPS antennas (which I'll detail in a later post along with the antennas I've made for my boat) and I can walk the area and map out all the manmade and natural structure that will eventually be underwater. If I need to I can access Google Earth, Bing and other online map services or any other information I might need after I get into the field

Here's a couple of pics with the unit in the Ram Mount like how I use it in my boat. It's running OziExplorer and Depths2Ozi showing some depth readings I took on a photomap I made at the outlet end of the Lake Odessa wildlife preserve in late July when I couldn't get on the river due to a late season flood

That should be enough to chew on for one post, I'll detail the system in my next post and then have some pictures of the setup in the boat along with the boat's electrical/electronics package

More Progress On the Bezel Mods

Things are really starting to come together now. I'll start out with a shot of the switch array ready for wiring. The way the LED is mounted may seem strange but the last thing I want when I'm out navigating the Mississippi River at night is an LED shining directly in my face. So it's mounted sideways which will give it a nice glow without being in your face. I just want something to indicate when it's powered up.

 

Here's a shot of the drilled bezel, followed by a picture of it in place over the switches

    

Now we get to the fun part, my technique for making professional looking labels for projects, making hamemade microwave touchpad style switch arrays or in this case individual switches. First I use a product for making your own indoor sign labels, it's basically photographic printer paper with a peel off back like an 8.5"x11" sticker. In this case it was just four labels printed on a laser printer using the white paper as the lettering and everything else solid black. The other product I'll use is self laminating pouches

 

I separate the two pieces and mainly use the sticky half but don't throw the other piece away, it makes a handy insulating material or for use in my switch array by punching out a circle with a hole punch

Which I then place on the back of my label just before I apply it to the panel which not only makes it wear better, it provides a little relief so you get a little bubble from the switch plunger without too much pressure  self activating the switch

Here is a picture of the bezel with the labels in place followed by a shot of the bezel with the laminating material applied

 

Normally I'd leave it as is although I would have made the lamanting one piece, but I need to deglare the bezel so I'll be painting it flat black. Flat black paint is the prototyper's/modifier's best friend. It's essentially a primer so it sticks well and because it doesn't contain so much plastisizer it doesn't react to surfaces or orange peel like regular gloss spray paint. It will build up layers real nice and is easy to touch up or repaint. It also hides small scratches and imperfections ... plus it looks industrial, rugged and IMO cool. So all I have left to do now is scuff up the gloss on the bezel with some fine wet/dry sandpaper so the paint adheres better and mask off the labels (I'll keep the 'Acer' at the bottom by the 'Aspire One' is getting painted over.)

Tomorrow I'll paint the bezel and wire the switch array and will have some more progress pictures in a couple of days ...

More Pics Of Bezel Mod

As I mentioned earlier I am adding 4 switches to the bezel, Power, WWAN, WLAN, and Bluetooth. The first picture is the two outside switches, as you can see I had to glue on some shims to level the board. The middle 2 switches go where the camera used to be and already have a little platform molded in.

Nothing fancy here, just thin PCB material with pads cut with a dremel

Here they are in place, I haven't soldered the middle 2 switches, I'll do that after I drill the holes in the bezel. The outside switches can be slide independently for final alignment. The extra pads I cut are in case I want to mount a power LED

 

Finally the bezel, I have the opening filed to just about the right size, I just need to knock down some slight high spots and make a groove for the flatcable so it doesn't get pinched. You can see I'm about ready to drill my holes

 

 

In a couple of more days I should have the bezel ready for preliminary testing of the touchscreen, then labeling and painting. 

Modifying The Screen and Bezel

Here are a few progress pictures. The first shows the before and after views of the back of the LCD and the wiring harness

The original

Here is the modified LCD and wiring

I undid the shielding around the LCD wiring and pulled back the wiring for the digital mic and the webcam. The webcam wiring will eventually go to a stripped down wireless mouse USB dongle so I can use A1ctl to turn it off and on.Then I just folded the flat part of the harness back on itself and secured with some foil tape.

Next up is the back half of the screen casing, first the original

 

Here is the partially modified case

 

 As you can see I've removed both the WWAN antennas  since I'll be running the inputs to the modem and GPS to separate jacks for my external antennas and I need the space to add some switches. Also removed is the webcam which is space I'd like to use for switches also. The WLAN antennas were swapped side for side and the wiriing rerouted down the opposite side. Next comes the fun part, finding tactile switches with the right heights so plunger/button top sits even with the top of the bezel.

Here is the bezel, I've taped it off so I have an idea of how much I need to file off and something to go by to keep it all neat, straight, and square. I haven't got too much left to take off

Hopefully in a couple of days I'll have some more photos documenting the addition of the 4 switches and my way of making them look professionally done.

Preliminary Teardown And Planning

Well after week and a half fighting software trying to get my new motherboard, processor and video working with Windows and even worse getting a 64 bit Linux Studio back up and running I've finally gotten into the hardware part of this project. The good news is the hinges and screen case are symmetrical and all you have to do is unbolt them at the hinge and swap them and it folds down perfectly into a tablet. Swapping sides for the wiring harness wasn't a problem either since I was removing the webcam and the microphone both of which I'll use in other projects. BTW the microphone is truly a digital unit (It has a nano technology 1-bit A/D converter built into the electret element, very cool) and I was surprised to see this relatively new technology filter down into the low end market so quickly. The bad news is since there is no touchscreen kit made for my model (AO531h) the closest was one was for a D150 so as I suspected a little soldering would be necessary, no big deal. The problem is the 531's are a slimline model and everything is packed in pretty tight including the LCD screen. The touchscreen I'm using is simply too thick and you can't get the bezel to snap down over it like on other models. I used a rigid one made by Hoda but the flexible models may be thinner and fit (If anyone knows chime in please). So i have to file the bezel opening down about a 1/16" on all sides. I have other work I need to do to the bezel too like add 4 switches for Power, WLAN, WWAN/GPS and Bluetooth. so I can power down unneeded devices to conserve power and I also want to paint the bezel flat black so it doesn't reflect when I'm navigating the river at night.

Anyways here are a few photos that show the insides and also how the hinges make it the perfect candidate for making into a tablet. Having to take a little off around the bezel is a piece of cake compared to having to cut a new hole in the back of the case like I've seen some guys do to make a tablet PC from a netbook.

 

 

I'll post some photos of the mods I'm doing to the bezel and display wiring in the next day or two and explain some of the mods I'll be doing like moving several switches to the front panel, adding Bluetooth, adding SMA jacks for the WWAN and GPS external antennas.

Catastrophe Strikes .... and a Fishing Database

Catastrophe strikes, my main computer's motherboard gave up the ghost and died. Well actually not the entire motherboard but the CPU socket is toast. The top (plastic of course) stud where you clip the heatsink two broke loose and when the fan and heatsink fell the suction created by the thermal paste pulled the CPU out bending some pins and apparently damaged the AM2 socket as a new CPU I had but hadn't put in yet wouldn't work either. So I got an upgrade motherboard that can handle AM2, AM2+ and AM3 CPUs so I can use my new Athlon X2 6400+ and 800Mhz DDR2 RAM now and upgrade to a quad core and 1066Mhz DDR2 RAM in a year or so when I feel the need to pep the system up again. I also upgraded my video card so it has more game performance as well as the HDTV/Blue Ray performance I already had.

So although I haven't gotten the 3D and depth maps together yet I did get my fishing database ready for others to download and use or modify or whatever. You need to have Open Office with Base and Writer installed (Everything else is optional for this case) You can download the Fishing Database here. Place it where you like, probably your My Documents folder. I also made a shortcut to it and placed it on my desktop so I can just click it and Open Office Base opens with it loaded. It should look something like this

 

 Make sure Forms is highlighted on the left and double click Fish Log to open the database. It should look something like this

Many of the entry boxes have drop down lists you can choose data or numbers from, making entry a lot easier. The form is set up in such a way that if something isn't on the list you can add it by manually typing it in and the new word (or number) will automatically be added to the list. Be aware that removing an entry from the list is a little harder as you have to do it in the Form Editor. Those who have some experience in Open Office or Microsoft Office probably won't have much problem modifying the lists or the basic database form.

Once you get some data into the database you can start doing Queries to look for patterns. You do this from the opening window and I added a few simple queries to get you started. To make you own queries you can just use the 'Wizard' to make your own queries, it's fairly self explanatory. 

 

 There are a couple of more things I would like to do to improve it. First (and undoubtedly the toughest) is make the GPS coordinate entry automatic or at least a lot easier. I'd also like to be able to link a database record to a waypoint on a GPS map. An easier addition would be adding an entry for Water Level Trend so I could note if the river/lake/reservoir is rising, falling or steady. Here's a couple of more screen shots of some entries in my personal database

 

  

Actually I had planned on having the netbook apart by now and having started on the hardware mods like touchscreen, adding wireless mouse and Bluetooth, and jacks for 3G and GPS antennas, etc. That still looks to be a week away as I'm doing a major cleaning and rerouting of cables and power lines for the rest of my stuff (I have 4 radios that are all controlled from this computer as well as recording gear). In the next couple of days I'll finally finish the 3D and depth maps and get them posted and hopefully late next week have some photos (and tales) of a dissected Acer 531h netbook.

More Custom Fishing Maps

Now I'm going to talk about my favorite source for maps, unfortunately it's only for the state of Iowa. Check your state government website to see if they have a similar thing. Since this was created mainly for agriculture use I'd bet most states with a lot of agriculture will have something like this. Modern farming uses GPS and mapping more and more to keep track of things like crop rotation, fertilizer and pesticide use. The Iowa Geographic Map Server gets a lot of it's current data from USDA National Agriculture Imagery Program.

I usually set it for 1500 x 1500 pixels squares which I can later stitch together into larger maps, for instance I have complete aerial and topographic maps of Pools 15, 16 and 17 on the Mississippi as well as Coralville Reservoir and the Iowa River from the Coralville dam to the dam in Iowa City. Center the map on the area you want by clicking on it and zoom in to 20 meters and hit the Refresh Map button, click on the map to center it better and then choose 1 meter and hit the Refresh Map button again. You can adjust the map again by clicking on it to recenter it. When you get a view you like hit the 'Download map' link at the top and download the 1x1 meter GeoTIFF. This can be imported into most GPS program and is pre-calibrated.

Here is a screen shot from a portion of a 2000x1700 meter (pixel) map in OziExplorer, you may recognize it's the same area as one of the hydrographic map screenshots earlier

Now you can hit the back button and choose another map in the exact same area. The map server has several current years as well as 1930's and 1950's maps and topographic maps. Here is a screenshot from a 1930's map same size same area. Note that this was just before they finished Lock and Dam 16 and flooded the pool. The average river levels are 6-7 feet lower than today

Next is a composite map from the two maps above. This is a little trickier to make because when you make your layers and save the finished picture you lose the geodata in the TIFF header so you have to get it back in there (Or hand calibrate). A basic overview of how I make the maps is first I open The Gimp and open as Layers the two photos with the most current color map on top. Then I adjust the transparency of the top color photo to 30% and save as as TIFF. For some odd reason you can't make this TIFF work in GPS mapping programs (At least in OziExplorer or Fugawi) it does all sorts of weird things when you resize it even though it works fine in most picture viewing programs such as IrfanView. So open it in IrfanView and resave as a TIFF. Next we need to get the geodata back in the EXIF header. Next you need the libTIFF library and GeoTIFF Tools GUI from libTIFF.org. First I open one of the original photo maps and use the GeoTIFF Tools to read the header data with the 'listgeo' button. This will also place the data in the next (2nd) box. In the third box I enter the new layered TIFF I just made and it will automatically sent it to the next (4th) box with '_gl' tagged at the end of the name. Now hit the 'geotifcp_1' button and import the finished image into OziExplorer (Or other mapping program that accepts GeoTIFFs). Here is a screenshot of the same area from the new map

Here's another set of examples, this is the same area in Credit Island Slough as one of the hydrographic maps earlier

The waypoints for the rockpiles are a little bit off, this is mainly due to the way I had to mark them, I nosed my boat up to them while the GPS antenna was in the back of the boat. I tried to nose up to each one from the same direction so they'd all be off about the same

Here's the composite map

And here's another composite map, this time showing the wingdams below the water along side Credit Island

My next post will show you some depth maps I made myself as well as some 3D bottom maps made with Dr. Depth

Custom GPS Enabled Fishing Maps

I've spent the last couple of days moving all my map and depth data over from my old laptop to my new netbook. I also sat down and finally worked out a way to make layered maps from GeoTIFF's and retain the EXIF geodata so they can be autocalibrated in my mapping programs. The first set of maps are hydrographic maps made by the US Army Corps of Engineers. You can find them here. The particular map I'm going to be using can be found here.

These maps aren't GPS calibrated and come in two forms, Adobe PDF and Autocad DWF files. You can download free DWF viewers from Autocad. This particular map is a PDF and what I do is blow it up to the size I want and copy the section of the map I want using the 'Snapshot' tool in the 'Tool' menu. Then I paste it into a graphics/photo editing program like Irfanview or The Gimp (Both are free) and then save as a PNG, TIFF, or JPG file. Most mapping programs seem to work best with PNG or TIFF. Next I bring it into my mapping program for hand calibration. Since these maps have a grid in UTM format I have to convert from UTM to lat/long decimal degrees. For this I use another freely available program from the USACE called CorpsCon. Once I convert all the UTM grid lines to lat/long I then calibrate the map in OziExplorer using a minimum of 3 points and usually use as many as possible to make the map more accurate. Now my map is ready to use. Here are some screenshots of my map with Waypoints added.


This is just a general overview of the area I'll be showing. Please note that the depths shown are at Flat Pool which is 2.5 ft so you have to get the current water level and adjust. For instance if the tail is at 5.5 feet you add 3 feet to the shown levels


This map is by the Interstate 280 bridge and it shows my most productive spots for fishing. Last July 6th on a full moon I caught 5 Flathead catfish on spot 1 and 3 more on spot 2 for a total weight of a bit over 50 pounds. Fishing the edge of this drop off and the ledge parallel to the shore has also been very productive for channel cats. These waypoints were originally marked a couple of years before I made this map and it was interesting to see how lined up with the dropoff


This final shot is up in the Credit Island Slough (Davenport, Iowa) and shows 3 rock piles that were once footings for barge piers which are below the surface of the water most of the time. This is an excellent spot for catching sunfish and bluegills for flathead bait but hard to locate without the GPS and map

As far as I know I am the only one that is making fishing maps from these hydrographic maps from the USACE but I have found them to be invaluable. In my next post I'll show you another source of maps I use (My main source) and some maps from it that cover these same areas as well as a unique layered photomap like none I've seen elsewhere.