20555
Now, let’s spill the milk. The Forester has been joined by an MY07 STI Impreza, a Hawkeye. But before we talk about the car and the plans for it, let’s start with where the Impreza spends most of its time — the garage.
I took advantage of the kindness of my local council and, at a promotional rate (dictated by the non-normative ceiling height), I became the tenant of a garage in a very hipster part of the city, which fits the car’s character quite well. The garage is nice, heated (the lowest recorded temperature during the winter was 18°C), in a closed courtyard, but it has just one small (narrow) flaw: it was built in the mid-1960s, in a building that once belonged to the Forests Commission (a coincidence? I don’t think so!) and was designed with the dimensions of cars from that era in mind. And while there are some people who could fit into it sideways, see:
Me being a software engineer I decided to solve the problem by coding. This is how the FHI Park Pilot was created: a second hand computer, a 24” monitor, and two FullHD cameras positioned along the door frame. Most importantly, the view from behind the wheel — a keen eye will notice the advanced sliding system, allowing for the adjustment of the monitor’s position :)
Here is one of the cameras, with additional lighting and Homer. The nuclear safety inspector from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant is an important indicator of the left side here. The way Linux kernel reads the camera drivers seems non-deterministic, so what should be the right and left cameras can sometimes get swapped.
The system is quite smart, apart from displaying the information on the screen it also broadcasts the feed on a local network:
This is the space available at the entrance. Not going to lie, it took some getting used to:
In the unlikely event of anyone ever needing this, FHI Park Pilot lives here: https://github.com/py20555sti/FHI.
This is an image that will stay with me for a wee while. It was 16th December 2022, around 8 p.m., and I had just driven back home in that beast of a car for the very first time:
And finally, those interested can ask Gerda the dog about our vacation plans:
