The UK quattro Network
The UK's mobile Audi 5-cylinder mechanic - 07833 654800, 24x7
Specialist in turbos, quattros, electrics and non-starts
About this system
This was originally written to evaluate the functionality of tablet computing devices in a workshop environment. The testbed was (and still is) a specially built IBM ThinkPad Transnote - an incredibly versatile device that functions as a laptop, electronic notepad and tablet with a touch-sensitive reversible screen. The entire site (not just the wiring diagrams) actually lives on a 1" square IBM 1GB Microdrive - occupying less than 5% of the capacity.
Currently (November 2007) the system continues to grow and now incorporates quite comprehensive errata and notes, significantly enriching the original Audi documentation; although there are probably still undiscovered errors. Hypertext proves to be a very useful technology in situations where frequent cross-referencing occurs, as it does especially in the early ur-quattros where many features were optional.
The diagrams themselves are in .PNG format - this was chosen because it is the preferred format of the W3 Consortium, is conservative with bandwidth, and is supported by more browsers than most other formats. If a diagram loads and then suddenly becomes too small to see, you may have to disable automatic image scaling - for Internet Explorer, click on Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced, scroll down to Multimedia and click off the check mark on "Enable Automatic Image Resizing".
The system is regularly tested with mobile devices such as the Nokia Communicator, PalmPilots and a Seimens S65. It's even been tried on an iPhone. Early experiences with WAP proved it was better to wait for the devices to catch up and use XHTML than it was to try and dumb the information down for WML. Individual pages are being converted to handheld compatibility (XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS2) in descending order of reference frequency.
Future Developments
The entire index structure is currently being reworked to reduce bandwidth requirements. The 35KB monolithic main index has already gone - each Model Year has its own HTML page linking back into a single cross reference to the numeric index. This is only one stage of a major change - the MB Component Lookup proved so useful that similar pages were started for the 1985 Model Year and the 20V - but it's a huge amount of work that in some cases has to be repeated, e.g., where several Model Years use the same feature diagrams. So a new approach has been started that will probably take a year or more to realise. Each of the diagrams will get its own English index - the first is online for Diagram 1 for test purposes. 58 more to go. It would be nice if they were all as simple as Diagram 2. Once these are all available, a table can be built of which diagrams are relevant to which Model Year and then a programme can be written to combine those diagrams into a component lookup for each Model Year. This will even allow consolidated wiring diagrams to be produced for cars with and without certain features, such as ABS. In the 1987 Model Year, there is even a change from Diagram 32 to Diagram 37 for ABS in the middle of the year.
No functionality will be lost in these changes - just go with the flow.
Kerbside Motors Home Page and Contact Information
Contact Phil Payne by email or use mobile/SMS 07833 654800