Apr 08, 2011 Second I want a program that I can render drawings of cars that I have. If anyone has seen the show Inside West Coast Customs or Street Customs thats the kind of software Im talking about to be able to customize anything. Does anybody know what program I can do this with or what program they use on the show? West Coast Customs, otherwise known as WCC, is a car repair shop located in Burbank, California. The shop mainly focuses on the customization of vehicles, a practice that includes modifying and altering a vehicle in order to enhance its performance or to make it look that little bit better. What-car-design-software-does-west-coast-customs-use.pdf FREE PDF DOWNLOAD NOW!!! Source #2: what-car-design-software-does-west-coast-customs-use.pdf FREE PDF DOWNLOAD There could be some typos (or mistakes) below (html to pdf converter made them): what car design software does west coast customs use All Images Videos Maps News Shop My saves.
The CDW Technoliner is “easily the most technologically advanced vehicle” that West Coast Customs has ever attempted, say Scott Voinovich (left) and Ryan Friedlinghaus.
Credit: Thomas Alleman
Credit: Thomas Alleman
At this year’s NCAA Final Four championship in Atlanta, hundreds of buses lined the streets near the Georgia Dome — but only one was truly unforgettable. The CDW Technoliner is unlike any other. The front end looks like the prow of a spaceship; inside, the big red bus packs more technology than is found in many businesses.
This past spring, a unique collaboration between CDW and West Coast Customs — perhaps best known for the MTV series Pimp My Ride and Discovery Channel’s Inside West Coast Customs — culminated in the creation of the Technoliner. Together, the technology provider and custom automotive company took a standard charter bus and turned it into a technology showcase on wheels, driven by its own data center.
Now, the bus is ready for serious business: There’s the learning lounge, stocked with Elo Touch Solutions displays that run a custom CDW touch application with whiteboard features and tablets for demonstrating the technology that’s loaded on the bus. There’s also the collaboration center with more iPads and charging stations.
In between the lounge and collaboration center are a pair of glass-enclosed server closets with two full racks of gear supporting the bus’s virtualized servers and home to the Cisco Systems Connected Stadium Wi-Fi, StadiumVision and StadiumVision Mobile products — enough computing and switching power to create a small data center. There’s also a NetApp storage area network to house data.
7 Weeks to Build the Ultimate Tech Vehicle
“The Technoliner is easily the most technologically advanced vehicle we’ve ever attempted,” says Scott Voinovich, project manager for West Coast Customs (WCC). “I don’t think anyone’s ever tried to put a Planar LED on the side of a bus before, let alone six of them. How cool is it to pull up in this thing and activate the screens? It’s an instant party and information center with the push of a button.”
Don’t miss the bus: The Technoliner is on the road now. See it up close and in person..
For WCC Founder and CEO Ryan Friedlinghaus, it’s the bus’s retro-future look that he finds most appealing.
“I love the front end,” he says. “It gives the Technoliner a retro look that’s different than any bus out there. And the interior is very futuristic, from the frosted glass to the stainless steel and the lighting. That really complements the technology we put inside.”
But the toughest challenge in getting the bus on the road to the Final Four was moving from concept to a finished vehicle in just less than seven weeks, Friedlinghaus says.
“This was the biggest build we’ve ever done in that short a period,” he says. “I had my whole shop, all 28 guys, working on this thing at some point. We definitely pulled a few all-nighters, but it was worth it in the end.”
And getting there was half the fun.
How Many Racks Can You Fit on a Bus?
While the WCC crew busily converted the 2008 bus into a state-of-the-art conference facility — ripping out the interior, replacing the seats with club chairs and post-modern benches, adding a molded fiberglass front end, modifying the luggage compartment to handle an 800-pound dining area on rails — a team of CDW solutions architects and systems engineers wrestled with turning it into a mobile data center.
Photo: Thomas Alleman
'[T]he interior is very futuristic, from the frosted glass to the stainless steel and the lighting. That really complements the technology we put inside,' says Ryan Friedlinghaus, West Coast Customs Founder and CEO.
It’s one thing to outfit a data center but quite another to squeeze one into a moving vehicle and make sure there’s room left over for meeting space and passengers, says Nick Mueller, a CDW technical architect who worked on the project.
“It was like setting up a streamlined branch office,” he says. “We needed all the usual stuff — networking, Internet, wireless access points, VMware, applications — plus the ability to deliver live video to multiple screens. And we had to do it in something that was mobile.”
It created some complex systems engineering challenges. Supplying enough power to keep two racks of Cisco Unified Computing System blade servers, switches and access points humming proved a major engineering feat. Buses typically draw at most 25 to 50 amps; the Technoliner requires in excess of 100, which is more than most small homes, CDW Program Manager Eric Woodfin says.
“The biggest challenge for us was providing enough rack space for all of the equipment and finding the right balance between uninterruptible power supplies versus line power conditioning,” adds Dan Vargas, a CDW solution architect and the team leader for the project.
Take a ride from your desktop. For a quick peek, check out this video: biztechmag.com/0213cdwbusreveal.
“It took some time to figure out how to get the racks down to size so we didn’t go over our power budget, yet still make sure we could showcase the latest cutting-edge equipment.”
Another concern was ambient heat, especially when the bus hits the road on a summer tour. To keep it cool, WCC installed four AC units on the roof, including one directly over the server closets.
Finally, there were the movable displays. The technology was solid and proven; Cisco StadiumVision–run displays are deployed in arenas around the world. But nobody knew if the six-screen external panel could survive the 2,000-mile trip from WCC’s workshop in Corona, Calif., to the parking lot of the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.
WCC and CDW finally decided to ship the Planar Systems screens separately and attach them after the bus reached its Final Four destination. Following the Technoliner’s Atlanta debut, the team devised a strategy for permanently securing the screens to the vehicle without damaging them.
“There’s a lot of technology on this bus that has to be applied to a real-world vehicle that drives down the street,” Voinovich says. (See “The Highlights Reel” for more about the technology components.)
Teamwork Is Not Just for Sports
Credit: Thomas Alleman
Ultimately, both the CDW and WCC crews agree that the Technoliner really shows off what technology can do. As a rolling demo lab, it offers sneak peeks at cutting-edge technology such as Cisco’s Connected Stadium Wi-Fi, which gives sports fans the ability to stream instant replays to their mobile devices or change camera angles with a tap of a finger.
But it also shows what teamwork can do — especially when trying to create something that’s never been built before, Woodfin says.
“West Coast Customs has been fantastic to work with,” he says. “They share similar values with CDW around meeting customer expectations, doing good work in difficult situations and taking on the toughest challenges.”
Voinovich concurs: “At West Coast Customs, we are open to any challenge — and this project really challenged us. A few years ago, we probably would not have been able to build this bus, nor would it have turned out as well as it did. The technology in this thing is absolutely amazing. We’re looking forward to working with CDW further as this bus goes down the road.”
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In this article we will look at the OBD-II sub-system and instrument cluster application of the Project Detroit Mustang we built with West Coast Customs. If you're not familiar with this project, you can find out more about it here and here.
OBD-II
OBD stands for On-Board Diagnostics. In the world of cars, this can be thought of as the computer which has a variety of data points which can be queried, such as speed, fuel level, and even trouble codes that relate to the check engine light. If you've ever taken your car in for service, your service center has hooked up the car to a computer via the OBD port to get the status of the car and what may not be working properly.
Getting Started
To use the OBD library with your vehicle, first you need an OBD to USB or serial cable. These can be found in numerous places, but we recommend this cable from ScanTool.net, which was used with the Project Detroit car and our software. Here's how to get connected:
- With the car off, plug the OBD end into your vehicle. The port is in a different location in every vehicle, but it's guaranteed to be somewhere near the driver's location.
- Plug the USB/serial end of the cable into your computer and note which COM port the cable is connected to.
- Update the app.config file of the InstrumentCluster project with that COM port.
- Start the car.
- Run the InstrumentCluster application, and data should start flowing.
Calling the OBD library programmatically
- Create an instance of the ObdDevice class
- Call the Connect method with the appropriate COM port, baud rate, and, if known, OBD protocol
- From here, the library works in two ways: automatic polling or manual polling
- Automatic – Pass true to the Connect method. This will poll the OBD as quickly as it can requesting RPM, MPH, MPG, Fuel Level and Engine Coolant Temperature. Note that not all vehicles will support all of these. In this mode, hook the ObdChanged event to receive an ObdState packet with the new data.
- Manual – Pass false to the Connect method. Then, create your own thread and call the ObdDevice's Get methods to retrieve the data you want as quickly as you want it. This is the way we used the library in Project Detroit. We polled manually, collecting the speed, RPM, and other critical data as quickly as possible, while only reading things like fuel level every few seconds.
OBD is a polled system, so data can only be returned as quickly as the time it takes to request it and return it. In short, only retrieve what you need when you need it.
Customizing the Instrument Cluster
The Instrument Cluster application is a WPF application that has 3 different skins which can be viewed by swiping left or right in the application, either with a finger, or the mouse. This is a simplified version of the actual application we used in the Project Detroit car, modified to talk straight to the OBD port instead of our intermediate WCF service. Please note that this isn't a robust, drop-in replacement application for a car dashboard, but only a sample of how the OBD library can be used.
Internally, the application uses the OBD library and hooks the ObdChanged event. The ObdChanged event returns a minimal amount of important data. When the event fires, the the SetInstrumentClusterValues method is run, which sets the OBD values to each gauge in whichever skin is currently visible.
What Software Does West Coast Customs Use Permit
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Known Issues / Limitations
What Font Does West Coast Customs Use
- This is known to work with cables that uses the ELM323/327 chipset. The specific cable that was used to develop this library is available from ScanTool.net, however other ELM323/327 OBD-II to USB cables should work.
- There are a variety of different OBD-II signal protocols. This library only supports a few of them. If your car's OBD protocol is not supported, please feel free to add it and send us the changes to integrate back into the library!
- If the vehicle has multiple ECUs, the ECU with the most PIDs is used. The other ECUs are ignored.
- Not every standard PID is supported.
- No custom manufacturer/model-specific PIDs are supported.