Mrmacomouto
16-01-2009, 09:49 PM
Over the past two years I have been very interested in the idea of using a computer to play music/etc in your car. I am a rather technical minded person but I have faced some new challenges in installing what is hopefully my final carpc for a while.
But before I get to the new ones:
CarPC one:
This PC comprised of a few trials and errors. First thing required was the screen, so I purchased a touch screen headrest monitor. The monitor had an interesting feature, it was removable, this ment that I could mould the mount into the dash without any risk to the monitor and I did, lots of bog, sanding, painting, sanding, sanding some more, and then finally a last coat of paint. Screen done.
I chose to use a laptop that had a broken screen, this appealed to me because it was cheap, had readily avaliable car power supplies and was relatively rugged. It wasn't rugged enough and died in testing before I had a chance to even put it in the car.
Next up was a spare machine I had, it was a PIII compaq, this was good because it was small and very durable, but ultimately failed because it was to small to cool properly and lacked in power.
CarPC two:
Next up I though, i'll just go bigger so cooling wont be an issue and there will be plenty of power. So I got a free P4 3ghz machine from work, added some more ram and put it all into a case. This worked fine for a whole hour before I realised yet another problem, it was to powerful, and thus overloaded the inverter I had.
Moving on:
I opted to use a power inverter from the start because they are readily available and very handy if you want to plug in a phone/laptop charger/low power drill etc etc. I never had a problem getting the machines to turn on either, most machines have an option in the bios to resume to last state on power loss meaning that so long as I never turned it off I would never have to turn it on.
PC's are very good for a lot of reasons, mainly because everything complies to a standard. The mother boards all use the same mounting holes, fans are of standard sizes, software will run on any hardware. This means that almost any combination of hardware and software will just work together.
Which brings me to the new car PC, or should I say Xbox.
I tried very hard to make the carPC's work, but the heat and power issues always seemed to pop their head up on a very hot day. What I needed was something small, low power usage and can cool it self pretty well, this lead me to the XBOX. Using a mod chipped XBOX I could run custom software (Xbox Media Center) that has a very well though out interface and hardware cooling support, I can choose a target temperature and XBMC will just speed up/slow down the fan until it gets there.
However XBMC has it's problems, it does not support my touch screen. This led me down the Linux path, I could have installed my touch screen drivers and run nGhost as a front end but it meant that I would have to go though dependency hell, and that was not going to happen. So I went back to XBMC and just had to give up on the touch screen ideas.
Anyway, enough of that, pics!
This is the xbox when I realised that it wasn't going to fit under the seat, I had to remove some height and there was plenty above the drives.
http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/7278/16012009053ef3.jpg
This is the xbox plugged into my Plasma, you can see how the media is layed out:
http://img79.imageshack.us/img79/6369/16012009055dd8.jpg
I soon realised that my "small" modifications weren't going to to "cut" it so i had to make them a bit more serious, back out comes the angle grinder. yes what you can see there is red tape, originally I had the xbox "open" but this was no good because bits of rubbish would be able to get inside etc.... I also had to remove the DVD drive for this to work, but it's not really an issue because it not line I can eject it under a seat, and I have FTP access and an 80GB HDD
http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/6844/16012009061vm5.jpg
But before I get to the new ones:
CarPC one:
This PC comprised of a few trials and errors. First thing required was the screen, so I purchased a touch screen headrest monitor. The monitor had an interesting feature, it was removable, this ment that I could mould the mount into the dash without any risk to the monitor and I did, lots of bog, sanding, painting, sanding, sanding some more, and then finally a last coat of paint. Screen done.
I chose to use a laptop that had a broken screen, this appealed to me because it was cheap, had readily avaliable car power supplies and was relatively rugged. It wasn't rugged enough and died in testing before I had a chance to even put it in the car.
Next up was a spare machine I had, it was a PIII compaq, this was good because it was small and very durable, but ultimately failed because it was to small to cool properly and lacked in power.
CarPC two:
Next up I though, i'll just go bigger so cooling wont be an issue and there will be plenty of power. So I got a free P4 3ghz machine from work, added some more ram and put it all into a case. This worked fine for a whole hour before I realised yet another problem, it was to powerful, and thus overloaded the inverter I had.
Moving on:
I opted to use a power inverter from the start because they are readily available and very handy if you want to plug in a phone/laptop charger/low power drill etc etc. I never had a problem getting the machines to turn on either, most machines have an option in the bios to resume to last state on power loss meaning that so long as I never turned it off I would never have to turn it on.
PC's are very good for a lot of reasons, mainly because everything complies to a standard. The mother boards all use the same mounting holes, fans are of standard sizes, software will run on any hardware. This means that almost any combination of hardware and software will just work together.
Which brings me to the new car PC, or should I say Xbox.
I tried very hard to make the carPC's work, but the heat and power issues always seemed to pop their head up on a very hot day. What I needed was something small, low power usage and can cool it self pretty well, this lead me to the XBOX. Using a mod chipped XBOX I could run custom software (Xbox Media Center) that has a very well though out interface and hardware cooling support, I can choose a target temperature and XBMC will just speed up/slow down the fan until it gets there.
However XBMC has it's problems, it does not support my touch screen. This led me down the Linux path, I could have installed my touch screen drivers and run nGhost as a front end but it meant that I would have to go though dependency hell, and that was not going to happen. So I went back to XBMC and just had to give up on the touch screen ideas.
Anyway, enough of that, pics!
This is the xbox when I realised that it wasn't going to fit under the seat, I had to remove some height and there was plenty above the drives.
http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/7278/16012009053ef3.jpg
This is the xbox plugged into my Plasma, you can see how the media is layed out:
http://img79.imageshack.us/img79/6369/16012009055dd8.jpg
I soon realised that my "small" modifications weren't going to to "cut" it so i had to make them a bit more serious, back out comes the angle grinder. yes what you can see there is red tape, originally I had the xbox "open" but this was no good because bits of rubbish would be able to get inside etc.... I also had to remove the DVD drive for this to work, but it's not really an issue because it not line I can eject it under a seat, and I have FTP access and an 80GB HDD
http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/6844/16012009061vm5.jpg