Both are not too hard to address.
If you have some sort of monitor program, you can detect when ignition power(ACC) goes away, then shutdown the PC in a graceful manner. The PC is running off from battery power to do this, of course. Very similar to a UPS based system.
Similarly, one can wake on ignition, and by having a startup item, start your program after the system starts up. If NT based, it is easy to configure the system to autologon and continue on.
JW
This seems overly draconian. Most modern PCs support other power states besides on and off. Deep sleep would be much better, IMHO, than 'off' when the ignition is turn off.
Kelly
The problem designing a computer system for a car to run a GPS or a analysing a cars electrical system,
one the operating system, when the power is shut down the turned on if you are using windows 95, 98, XP the operating system goes into a scan disk or some other self diagnostic mode, plus keyboards and a mouse has to be connected.
Then comes the software that has to be auto activated when the computer is fired up so one dosen`t have to use a keaboard or mouse. This system would just use the one program.
With all these problems I can see why people use pic chips.
Is there some way around these problems, so the power can be disconnected from the computer without having to use a keaboard or mouse to shut it down.
Plus have the software fire up soon has power is applied.
And I don`t think there is any embedded 95 or 98 operating systems around which most of these programs will ooperate in.
Thanks BOB
Didn't sound like he was planning on using a "modern" machine. He was talking about 9x as an OS. I agree that there are other power states, but it depends a great deal on your hardware and if your OS recognizes and supports this. You still need some way to input this info to the machine w/o typical user input.
I suggested a simple method that would work for nearly any OS/hardware combination.
Another concern is sleep current. I don't know what the sleep current is in a PC at the various stages, but you are going to want something that can drop down to very low mA if not uA.
JW
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