Car PC Ireland

Pitiful Photo Post

2007-08-31T07:55:00.000-07:00

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!!!!

2007-07-26T03:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-24T01:35:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-04-13T01:46:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-08T05:17:00.000-07:00

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.

Class!!! check this out!

2007-04-08T05:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.deloreanmacmini.com/

GPS info

2007-04-05T02:56:00.000-07:00

We are currently testing City Nav + Nroute to get GPS working on windows XP. We're using a bluetooth GPS receiver that we bought from blueunplugged.com but we'll probably end up going with a USB model. Wireless is great and all but I love the reliability of good old copper wire, you can't beat it.

Current Situation

2007-04-05T02:38:00.000-07:00

Touchscreen: received + tested fine.
Motherboard: received + not tested yet.
CPU: received + not tested yet.
RAM: received + tested. lots of beeps on Gary's machine. Sounds bad. needs further testing.
HDD: received + tested fine.
PSU: not yet received.

Motherboard and RAM found

2007-03-26T01:51:00.000-07:00

After quite a lot of research, gary stumbled across a socket 478 mobile Pentium or Pentium M chip and one single motherboard that supports it. We're sure there are probably more but so far we've only been able to come up with one. He also decided on a 10.4" Lilliput touch screen. The resolution is 800x600. so here's the system specs so far:

MSI 915GMm Speedster-FA4 Motherboard
Intel Pentium M (Dothan) CPU at 1.73GHz - 533MHz FSB and 2MB L2 Cache
Samsung PC2-4200 DDR2 512MB
Seagate Momentus 5400.2 80GB SATA-150
Lilliput 10.4" LCD touch screen
Samsung SN-324 Combo Internal CDRW / DVD drive

CPU bought

2007-03-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

Gary bought a Pentium M CPU (1.7GHZ) today for uk£45. That should work out after shipping at about €75 - €80 - not too bad methinks. We're definitely going with the mini-ATX board now.

Hard Drive Sorted

2007-03-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

Gary won his bid on the 80GB seagate HDD (Serial-ATA). so that looks like the hard drive for our project sorted....
It's a Seagate Momentus 5400.2 80GB Hard Drive

Current ebay bids on parts

2007-03-22T04:33:00.000-07:00

Gary has a bid on a Pentium M 1.7GHz processor and an 80GB Seagate 2.5" HDD now and also has found a mini-atx motherboard to buy if he wins the CPU bid, as the mini-ITX motherboards we were looking into are far too expensive. We'll keep u posted

Laptop buying not going as well as previously thought

2007-03-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

We're having trouble sourcing a laptop for the project from ebay. There's a lot of shrewd characters about who know just when to pounce on an auction and it's just not working out YET. Hopefully we'l be on track soon. It's quite possible Gary will end up buying a cheap low-spec working laptop instead of a decent spec one with a dodgy screen. We'll see how it goes.

Disclaimer

2007-03-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

{disclaimer} Of course all of this info is just that, info. We cannot be held responsible for software that we recommend breaking your machine / doing anything on your machine you don't want it to. The info on these pages should be treated with discretion and really you should know a bit about software / hardware / cars before you attempt to try any of the stuff we have tried. Please refer to manufacturers guidelines for your car and to be honest don't try any of this at home. We did not ask you to do anything and if you do something and it breaks something we cannot be held responsible for any of the somethings above. We also cannot be held responsible for information on other websites which I link to. Please use your head. ;-)
{/disclaimer}

Idea 1 - Gary's Car

2007-03-20T05:55:00.000-07:00

Ok this is my first post on this blog but I'm going to keep it brief as I'm busy busy busy.
This blog is about building Car PCs - basically it's about building custom computers into Irish cars, and all the pitfalls to avoid therein. This may sound silly but can be very useful when you think about large harddrives full of MP3s, Cheap GPS systems, full control of your mobile phone and SMS with speech recognition, cheap reversing cameras etc. etc. the possibilities are endless. Almost any system that you can buy for your car you can do on the cheap. I'm sure many of you have thought about these things already and that's why you're looking at this blog so I think I'll get on with it.

My friend Gary and I decided to build a PC or a laptop into his car and try and build as many features into it as possible. I also intend to do the same when I buy my own first car later this year. Obviously we're both into PCs. We're also both into electronics, Gary probably more so than me. I'm more into software and I'll have a lot of fun messing about with the system, building a custom GUI etc.

Gary owns a Mazda 6 and without getting into too much detail he wants to build it into the car so that it's almost invisible apart from the screen, but he also doesn't want to spoil the dash as he will probably want to sell the car some time in the future. We have been brainstorming and researching for a couple of weeks now and here is what we came up with as a basic plan:

First of all, we decided on a touchscreen.
Gary has been researching screens and I will post up more info shortly on what we've decided.
We've also decided to mount a bracket in the little flip tray in the dash and then mount the screen so that it can swivel from left to right for driver and passenger. We think it would be best that the screen could be removed, for security reasons etc. We decided on a laptop for the project too as after researching this for a while we thought a PC project would be too costly for a couple of reasons. The first being that it would be much cheaper just to buy a working laptop with a broken screen, and the second that 3.5" IDE hard drives just wouldn't survive the knocks, especially on Irish roads :-) Laptop hard drives are built to survive a bit of tilting and a couple of knocks. Gary has already bid on a laptop with a busted screen on ebay last night so we'll see how that goes.

Here's the overall view of the project, the basics that we want to cover (click to see in proper detail):

There are many other ideas we came up with that we may implement but the stuff above is what we MUST cover.... Gary has a strong need for GPS as he drives around Ireland a lot for his job, looking for houses in villages, towns, cities, whatever. After a bit of research we're nearly sure we'll be going with the Navteq maps of Ireland and apparently at this stage we're looking into the Alturion software package, as there doesn't seem to be a lot of GPS software for Windows XP that supports Navteq maps, which incidentally seem to be the best maps of Ireland as far as we know.

We also thought it would be a good idea to implement WIFI in the system so that Gary can transfer files / info from his home PC to his car and vice versa. This allows for a lot of customisation and he can download RSS feeds before he leaves the house (which we will probably convert to speech audio for output). He can browse the web from the car if near a WIFI hostpot etc. etc. etc. - again the possibilities are endless:

Other possibilities that we have considered for implementation:

Digital CCTV around the car (useful for robberies, accidents etc.)
Loudspeaker under bonnet for audible speech alarm signals, like "Step Away from the Vehicle" etc.
Number plate recognition + storage to database with timestamp etc.
Rear Led screen which can give specified info to car behind [we probably will not do this as it is highly illegal ;-) ]
Many many other things too numerous to mention for the time being.

I will keep this blog up to date as often as possible on our progress. All comments are welcome and encouraged. Has anyone done a similar job??? also you can email your comments to
thedavil@gmail.com