Pitiful Photo Post

Unfortunately me + Gary are still far too lazy to do a video or too many photos of the first car PC we've done - so there.... anyhow I have a couple of pics here but not many. Long story.... anyhow here we go

MASSIVE UPDATE ON THE WAY!!!!

Sorry I haven't updated the blog much lately. To be honest I wasn't sure anybody was even looking at the site, but I got an email today from somebody who wanted to know a bit more.
However the car PC is fully functional and we're just ironing out a few kinks at the moment.

The touch screen is mounted on a custom built metal mount (Gary designed it himself and got some engineers to build it cheap enough). Anyhow it tilts left and right and up and down. I'm not sure if it's removable but I'm gonna do an interview of sorts with Gary soon and take a helluva lot of photos for you all to see how it went. Also I'd imagine we'll draw diagrams of the wiring layout (however simple) and the custom housing etc...

Maybe if I get off my arse and write some decent voice recognition software Gary might be able to use the PC while driving.

Exact Specs of final machine to follow....

WIFI works great,
GPS works great
BLUETOOTH + "phonetools" software - we've almost got that working .... Gary has an incompatible bluetooth dongle but I think I have one that will do the trick... I'll post up recommended hardware specs soon too.

So there should be a massive update to the blog coming! stay tuned..

state of play today

Ok Gary has got XP PRO installed on the HDD. We left a partition space for linux and a bit for apps and a last bit for MP3s and videos. The system has powered up from the Car battery with no problems. The AuxMod has been received but not yet tested. The touch screen needs to be powered by the computers PSU and we were a bit worried about that but it worked perfectly!!! Now it's down to wiring up the car, in particular, putting a hole in the firewall in the car so we can put the power leads through. Also we need to fit a long power cable from the PSU in the boot to the screen in the front. Gary already bought a decent length of cable to power the computer in the boot from the battery, however, he will need more wire for the screen and for the wire to the ignition (the m2-atx power supply powers up and down with ignition) Gary has enlisted the help of his neighbour who is a mechanic but as Gary's a busy man (aren't we all?) it might take a while to get it all installed. Then again, he is super-excited like a kid at Christmas so it might not take that long.........

Images of custom housing

Here are some images of the custom housing in the boot (Click to enlarge)
































Loads more to follow!!!

These images are a few days old and my Dad cut out some decent fan holes in the box so I'll take some more pictures and show where the fans are mounted etc.
We're no experts on airflow but Gary seems to have done his homework and we will do plenty of testing before we "go live" :-) - anyway he's probably gonna fit ducting / tubing / whatever you call it to the fan at the top and give it a decent exhaust area. Ah it'll be grand, we'll work it out...

a little update

Ok I haven't been on here much but I'm waiting to get my own home PC fixed so we can start uploading photos etc. but to give you guys an update.........

DONE SO FAR

• We have the motherboard mounted in an MDF box (plans to follow)

• We have the PSU mounted in the box also. We have the hard drive mounted on rubber grommets / washers / whatever you call them in the box too.

• The computer has successfully powered up from the car's battery and the touch screen is working. (although we haven't yet tested the touch functionality)

• GPS system has been tested on another XP machine and seems to work fine, with good maps of Ireland.

• Optical Drive working, we booted a copy of backtrack for testing

YET TO BE DONE

• Windows and or Linux have yet to be installed.

• The box has yet to be painted or covered in something.

• Airflow testing yet to be done.

• Cake to be eaten when job is finished!

another update.

Here's the state of play so far:

* DISPLAY: Lilliput 10.4" Touchcreen LCD

* MAINBOARD: MSI Speedster 915gm Micro-ATX Mainboard

* PROCESSOR: Pentium M (Dothan) 1.73ghz CPU

* COOLING: Zalman 7000b Al/Cu FHS

* RAM (temp): Samsung 256mb DDR2 pc4200 X 1 DIMM

* HDD: Seagate Momentus 5400.2 - 80Gb SATA

* OPTICAL: Samsung SN-324 CD-RW/DVD Combo Slm ATAPI

* GPS: Generic USB G-Mouse - 32 channell using Mediatek MT3 chipset

* CONNECTIVITY: 54mbps USB Wi-Fi Dongle & USB Bluetooth v.1.2 Dongle

* PSU: M2-ATX 160w PSU

* AUDIO: Sylfex AuxMod Basic for interfacing with MAZDA6 stock audio.

How we're getting on

We finally got the PC into the box. My father's a carpenter so we enlisted a little help. We got the motherboard in, fitted the CPU, put in the ram (it's definitely fubar, Gary tells me he dropped it), put in some more RAM from Gary's home machine, and it booted up fine. We checked the CPU temperature in the BIOS/setup screen and it was running at 22 degrees celsius. I don't know much about anything... but that sounds good to me. We tried to boot a quick linux bootable disk this morning and it got to text prompts etc. but we couldn't "startx" because the screen couldn't handle the resolution and unfortunately you can't edit xorg.conf on a CD-R. unless you're Gandalf. I had thought about ramdisks etc. but I just got lazy very quickly. What's important is we know it works. We're going to cut some fan-holes soon and get the hard drive into the box. The HDD by the way is probably going to be suspended with strong elastic bands or really thin bungee cord. This is obviously to avoid the knocks and bumps that Gary will likely experience when driving his car around Ireland.

Anyway, A few pics of the box etc. to follow.