I thought you might be interested in seeing some early pictures of the prototypes for the vs basic hardware we've been working on with the China team. Some notes: The design uses a metal rectangular "tube" style case, customised for us and cut to the width of our board. The case ends up about 7cm x 6cm. Labelled end-plates will go on, with cut-outs for the various connectors. The original design called for this to be black in colour, and we're still deciding on that (as the silver doesn't look bad and will be mostly covered with a black sticker anyway). Opening it involves removing the 4 screws on one side and sliding it out. On one side we have the CAN (and power) DB9, GSM and GPS antennas. On the other side we have the DIAG DB9 and expansion bus connectors. Holes for the LEDs are on the bottom of the case, and the LEDs themselves are on the bottom of the board, so that they are as close to the holes as possible. There are zero internal cables, and only one circuit board containing the PIC controller and SIM908 modem - connection to the car is via the main CAN DB9, using custom cables. We have tried to follow ODBII standard pinouts for that connector. For Tesla Roadster, we can use a custom 4 wire connector (Tesla DIAG port connector on one end, DB9 female on the other). For ODBII cars, a similar arrangement can be made. The SIM908 modem chip supports GPS for those cars that don't have it. Still early days, but the design looks workable and should be much easier to assemble and QC than the v1 modules. Rock solid and (probably) bullet proof. It should also have good support for cars other than the Tesla Roadster. Regards, Mark. P.S. I'm also working on a more advanced hardware solution, as a personal project, that may end up being offered. Just experimenting at the moment. William is also working on some solutions for this based on *bone hardware and shields. These are much longer term, and we'll send out more details when we have some progress.
