Gadgetory

every year the Fox rally sees a bunch of really crappy cars drive from Perth across the Kimberley up to Darwin to raise money for the cancer council Jim wild has worked on the software development for what they're calling the connected car hi doom hi okay can you tell us a little bit about who's behind this project ok so it's deep end and its sister agency nomad it's who I work for so we're a digital agency in Surrey Hills refocuses and what is the connected car um well basically we wanted to be able to track the entire trip as they got a guy's driving across Australia now traditionally there's very little mobile signal in the outback so 2g 3G 4G it really doesn't work for large parts of the journey satellite broadband is ridiculously expensive and as we're doing this for charity we can we can fund that so actually managed to find a way of sending short messages through satellite on the Iridium network using short bursts data so we came up with a protocol of our own to actually talk to the car and send messages back so we can we can find out things like the car temperature how fast they're going and we can send the messages back saying when people are pledging to change the tracklist or to say turn the air conditioning on enough so this idea started with your team leading to communicate with the car but it seems like it's evolved into something that the people at home can get into as well absolutely i mean we wanted it to be an interactive experience so we set up a website rally the future calm delay you where people can actually go and they can pledge they can do things like pick a track on a spotify playlist or like i said they can turn the air conditioning on or off or they can just send the guys a message going hey guys you're doing a great job here's a donation and likewise get some feedback from the car find out what's going on six are going to get into any trouble with the engine temperature for example we will know about it hopefully before they do and the guys raised 1.4 million dollars overall is 150 cars involved so last year was massive we want to try and smash that this year so yeah it should be a great event