Would be a time saver if instead of shutting down you had it triggered to stand by at loss of ignition. I'm sure there is a way to accomplish it if you think about it.

Perhaps have it set to standby on power button press, and then have a relay trigger the pressing of the power button on car start to fire it up and car stop to go back into standby.

I don't know about standby, but hibernation would be possible. But the way the computer boots is just like coming back from hibernation anyway. It copies the entire OS from the memory card and loads it into ram; then the memory card is left alone until next boot. So I think the time advantage would be minimal.

The way its set up right now is hard power with the ignition. Actually the DC to AC inverter is fed right off of the Fuel Pump relay. As soon as the inverter gets power at key on, it sends power to the computer power supply which is automatically switched on by the motherboard which was wired to do so by the manufacturer. I actually pulled this board out of one of those touchscreen gaming consoles that you see at the bars. I like having the ability to switch the key and have the computer boot and shut off with out intervention. Thanks Windows XP Embedded!

EDIT: Oh and, I put the system in the car tonight and drove around. It worked flawlessly. The xbox controller worked just like I wanted it to. Now I've got a couple of files to import to Megalog Viewer, have it auto adjust the tune. Reload the tune and do it all over again. Got up to 5500 rpms tonight, JIMP!

So the most annoying thing about this computer is the BIOS. It takes 35 seconds to get through post. Well, I spent the last 6 hours compiling a new bios for my motherboard.

It'* called Coreboot. It'* a interesting open-source project that'* still very much in it'* infancy. So it took a lot of time and research to build a firmware that would work on my motherboard. This was all done in Linux btw.
After compiling coreboot, all I had to do was load the software to go with the firmware. I chose a program called seabios. It'* exceptionally small and powerful. Of course it has to be small because the flash chip I'm using is only 512kb. The thing about this bios is that all of the settings are preset, so there is no 'press delete to enter bios,' I set them all ahead of time. But that'* not to say that it doesn't allow hardware change. I can add or subtract boot devices and it will automatically configure them. After all the software was done, I had to burn it on to a new chip. So I grabbed a chip off of a spare motherboard I had laying around, and flashed the new bios on it with Uniflash..... DONE!

But the MAIN reason I went through all of this trouble was my boot time. I had the factory AwardBios tweaked to boot as quickly as possible and it was still dog slow.

Enough talk, on to the vid

[YT]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2VXoI3XTq4[/YT]

EDIT: oh and the best part, I'm down to 32 seconds from key on to datalogging.

So, I've always wanted to have a lcd display in my car. They sell a kit for the meqasquirt, but I don't like to spend money.

While I was at the recycling center I found this LCD. Hantronix 2x24, no backlight though. Well, I did some research and wired it into a LPT port. Then I got some software from sourceforge to output data for it. I made a video, but youtubes compression doesn't let you see the data. Now I just have to figure out how to output engine data.

[YT]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyy4pH0pbnE[/YT]