in car pc

robkendall · Post by **robkendall** » Sat Jul 24, 2004 2:20 am

for both JohnT and Murf.

did you build the car pcs yourselfs...ie cannibalised from some source, or did you buy a kit and build/install?

if you built them from scratch, would either of you fancy doing an in depth piece detailing how to, what to look out for, what to avoid etc?
fancy doing something similar to put all me mp3s and such like on!

have found a decent OS based on linux.....is that what youre running?
rgrds
rob

Murf · Post by **Murf** » Sat Jul 24, 2004 8:45 am

i built mine myself, got an old P3 600Mhz and stripped it down.
i spaced out the motherboard and bolted it to a sheet of stiff plastic, then built a case round it. i had to do it this way to get it waterproof and also to get it to fit under the drivers seat, it was pretty tight!!
had to use half height graphics card and sound card as standard ones were too tall to fit under the seat.
i built a 12V DC PSU and fitted it in the centre pocket with the cables running to under the seat where the pc lives.
i used a standard hard drive wrapped in foam wrap to protect it from shock.

dont think i put pics up but i also fitted a slim laptop CD drive in the govebox and a little usb port at the back for peripherals.

i honestly dont know what advice to give you, if your putting it on the floor make it waterproof. put hot glue on your pci cards to stop them vibrating loose.use a nice big hard drive and put a power kill switch on the dash somewhere so you can restart it if it crashes when driving.

i dont know a thing about linux so i'm using stripped down win98 at the moment using winamp (loads automatically from the start menu) with set hot keys for play/pause etc.

best thing to to is to start it and learn as you go along, if you have any questions email me and i will try to help you.
now, over to johnt |
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JohnTurbo · Post by **JohnTurbo** » Sat Jul 24, 2004 11:02 am

The one thing which dictated how mine went was the screen i used. I wanted to use the screen from a psone, which is used for in car stuff and general portable play for the playstation one. This cost Â£40 new and being a sony tft is very bright and looks great. Only problem was its 720x576 resolution. You try getting windows to give you that! I originally toyed with just using a tv out...so i bought a 500mhz SFF compaq for Â£40, it had a built in agp card, but no tv out, so i had to buy a pci one. This was to live in my spare wheel well. When i got it working on the bench though, the resolution was not great, i couldn't make out size 8 fonts for instance. I discovered that TV out is really the worst way of doing this, and stuff was only ledgible when running extra large fonts in windows. The main thing i wanted was a decent GPS system for hardly any cash, and this was not going to happen with tv out. I discovered a way of wiring a vga cable to it, for rgb input, using just a resistor, but had to use a program called powerstrip to force the resolution. Basically theres only a few cards which will a) do that res, and b) have c-sync. These are basically most radions and some of the better old matrox cards. Since i had an AGP matrox g200 lieing around, i tried this, and it worked great, really clear. Only thing...it wouldn't go in my compaq.

At this point i scrapped the compaq idea, which was a shame as it was low power and very rellable. I bought a Â£20 micro atx motheboard, sawed off the back of my glovebox, and fitted it in there with a standard 300w psu. I threw in 256ram and an 800mhz chip, and a standard bubble wrapped hd.

I built the screen into the center console where the cubby holes would be and put the remote keyboard sensor in there. I intend to use a fancy touchpad called a cirque cruise cat, but this is still on a ship coming from the US, as they are Â£65 in the uk.

For power, not being an electronics genius like mr murf upthere, and not wanting to shell out Â£80 for a psu, i just bought a decent 330w inverter from ebay, which lives under my passenger seat.

Originally, i wanted to use a micro itx board and dc dc psu, which would have been more neat, but this was too much Â£Â£Â£ for me.

Gps transponder and software are also on the way.

Cost rundown:-

Screen Â£40
Board Â£20
chip - had one
gfx - had it
ram - had it
HD - from compaq, which was Â£40
inverter - Â£35
keyboard - Â£12
Touchpad - Â£20
gps unit - Â£35
Gps software - Â£10

All in...Â£212 plus a few cables...was under Â£225.

robkendall · Post by **robkendall** » Sat Jul 24, 2004 7:11 pm

so basically its suck it and see?
was looking on the net....everyone seems to have cottoned on that people want in car pcs.....you can buy em complete....but theyre anywhere from 300 quid upto and over a grand!
the main thing i was worried about was the psu, but the motor spares shop at the top of mi road sell em for things like in car PSone etc so i assume these will power the pc.
did you have to do anything different with the os? ie when you switch the car off, it just kills the pc?....how does that afect the OS?
have got a few bits and pieces lying around, the only thing i aint got is a tft screen, but i do have a laptop....have youy ever tried to wire up a laptop screen to a monitor plug (ie so it just plugs in!)? if so do you have a wiring diagram?
thanks in advance guys!
rgrds
rob

edit.....ps, this is the web site with the linux os and other stuff on it....isnt too bad!
http://www.dashpc.com

LASEROWL · Post by **LASEROWL** » Sat Jul 24, 2004 7:24 pm

Rob

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... eName=WDVW

this company is on ebay a lot seams a good price for a 7" TFT screen.

The way im going to go eventually.

robkendall · Post by **robkendall** » Sat Jul 24, 2004 10:07 pm

cheers mr owl!
nice monitor.....notquite sure i understand the description though.
the title suggests its 125 quid for the monitor and a laptop type pc?
the description only suggests its for the mnitor.
hmm......will have to look itno it further!

thanks for link

rgrds
rob

JohnTurbo · Post by **JohnTurbo** » Sat Jul 24, 2004 11:10 pm

No rob, to power a PC takes a special type of power supply. Think about all the stuff on an atx connector. It also has to modulate, as a running car throws out up to 18v. Mr murf it seems built the pretty complex circuit to cover this, but to buy one is upwards of Â£80 for a mere 150w. - this is why i went for an inverter.

JR

Murf · Post by **Murf** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 1:42 am

the screen is the last of your concerns!
i cant just shut it off, i have to shut it down like a normal PC. hope i dont seem like an arse as i am pretty pissed at the mo but PSU's are fairly complex, i could build you one if you could wait for it but you might be better going for an inverter or buy a 12V psu for bout 90 bucks.
lilliput monitors are the dogs nob, especially if you buy the tochscreen versions, i bought a 7" widescreen monitor off ebay for about Â£60, its a tv-out monitor though and not the best quality. lilliputs are VGA input so are sharp as fook!!

well worth building thogh as i have about 25gig of mp3's on tap, just a bit better than a cd changer!! (understaement of the year)!

JohnTurbo · Post by **JohnTurbo** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 10:23 am

i would have bought a liliput but for the postage price. It adds up to the price of a normal pc 15inch tft screen and seeing as i decided i couldn't couldn't justify buying one of them...

Anyway if anyone wants to go the TV out route, i have a pci graphics card which remembers its tv out settings on flash memory, and so doesn't give you the ntsc flicker all the way into windows. It also has a lot of fine tuning options on the driver which means you can make everytihng nice and ledgible. Was just a bridge too far on my little screen though.

robkendall · Post by **robkendall** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 11:20 am

will the power thing that the motor spares not power a pc then?
its supposed to convert the car power to one needed by 240v equipment, like psones etc.
maybe its terminology....it could be an inverter?
been speaking to a computer shop near me....they may be interested in building one a complete pc cheap,as long as they can use the knowledge and plans etc to sell on complete units....ie me guinea pig....i dont mind!

managed to get the laptop monitor running off the 'serial' monitor port on my mb this morning,but its really flaky and grainy.....will keep experimenting!

rgrds
rob

red480gt · Post by **red480gt** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 1:21 pm

Can you post some pics of your PC installs?

ste

Murf · Post by **Murf** » Sun Jul 25, 2004 8:08 pm

man, i dont even remember posting that last night, too much jack daniels!!

if its an inverter you are buying thats fine, it converts the 12v dc from your car battery into 230v ac, then you simply plug the power plug for the PC PSU into the 3 pin socket.

a word of warning though, they arent all that efficient and you might find it drains your battery if you've got your gear on with the engine off.
also the main concern i had was the PC reboooting when you crank the engine. ie, when the engine cranks the voltage drops because the current demand from the starter motor is so high9watch your voltmeter when you start the engine). good dc-dc converters use low dropout components so when you turn over the engine the supply to the psu isnt lost and your computer doesnt switch off (ie, not even shut down!!)
a remedy for this is to turn the engine on and then switch on the PC but this would have annoyed me graetly
mine will not switch off until the voltage drops below 8v which is pretty reasonable.
another case against the inverter is space, you need two big boxes instaed of just one (fairly) neat little circuit.

also there was one nitpicky part of my brain that couldnt stand to see voltage changed from 12v dc to 240v ac, just to be changed back again (inside the psu) to 12v dc (and 5v and 3.3 etc) sometimes i annoy even myself!!

its all here:

http://img4.photobucket.com/albums/0603 ... phy/CarPC/

robkendall · Post by **robkendall** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 8:18 am

nice mr murf!
foundthis about psus whilst browsing the t'internet.
http://crafty.8bit.co.uk/pcincar.htm
cant really say i understand it all though...

would it power the complete pc unit?
making all the bits fit together isnt that much of an issue for me, but making sure i power it right is....

rgrds
rob
ps.....as an afterthought.....have you ever thought of controlling an electronic valve from your pc...ie in application as an MBC?
im sure there are valves on the market that can be operatde electronically that do the same thing as an MBC....you could maybe get finer adjustments available?
just a wild thought!

480_rocket · Post by **480_rocket** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 10:16 am

What I would probably do, is buy a laptop from ebay that has a broken screen, so many about. It's small and usually requires just one supply volatge. Leave the battey in it, so when cranking you don't have the laptop shutting down.

You'd need either a VGA screen or TV screen, as modern laptops have TV out.

I'd have wireless I think on it as well so I could park up and upload MP3s from my home PC.

Low power consumption too, fit anywhere, sounds good to me.

Murf · Post by **Murf** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 11:47 am

yes, the laptop plan is a good one, you might be easier going with that option.

as far as that website goes the power supply he has designed wouldnt be much use. for a start he has designed it for an old 486 pc which would have an "AT" spec compliant motherboard. these have much simpler power supply requirements than ATX spec but your processor speed wouldnt be much over 400Mhz if you are lucky because it is for fairly old pc's. secondly he has not gone about it in a very sophisticated way, he has used linear voltage regulators which are notoriously inefficient and have a max current of probably around 1.5A. a typical ATX spec PC would require anything up to 12-15A by the time you take into account peripherals like HDD and cdrom, an athlon processor alone can use up 100Watts easy!!
i also doubt it would run with the engine off as the linear regulators would probably need a supply voltage 1.5v above their output to work therefore when the engine is off the 12v regulator would only get 12V input instead of the 13.5V it would need to be able to output, therefore the pc wouldnt boot up.
last but not least, it definately wouldnt survive cranking the engine over!!

when i selected the mobo/cpu combo for my pc i found a chart on some website that gave the power requirements for most common processors, i found that one of the lowest demanding processors was the P3 600,think off my head the cpu and mobo consumed only 40Watts, one of the main reasons i chose that cpu. it also still seems to be a fairly capable processor and its hard to notice much difference in normal applications between that and the XP1800 in my desktop pc.

this link might be of some help:
http://www.via.com.tw/en/VInternet/Pete ... CPower.pdf

martinholmesuk · Post by **martinholmesuk** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 12:05 pm

I just got this http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... 5111159191 from Ebay. I need to get a cpu/ram/hdd now.

I'm thinking of making a recorder for the TV but I guess it could be used for the carputer?

Review @ http://www.t3.co.uk/reviews/default.asp ... tionid=676

robkendall · Post by **robkendall** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 8:29 am

thats a pretty damn good find martin!
you could probably fit it in one of the carbays....like the head unit bay size i bet!
if not,you could always chuck it in the glove box!
even though itsnot that expandable....its gonna cover pretty much all you need for a carputer i bet!
hmmm.....have to keep my eye out for one of them!
rgrds
rob

480_rocket · Post by **480_rocket** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 10:03 am

I looked on ebay last night, litereally hundreds of dodgy old laptops with broken screens!!

Theres some places one of those tiny computers can go, maybe in rear wheel arch, opposite to the ABS computer. I think under the rear seats there is a small amount of space.

If the screen is fitted where the cubby hole is, near the front ash tray, doesn't the gear stick get in the way of viewing? (ie watching a film!!)

I know you can get screens that pop out of a standard radio size hole. I can't find them, don't know if they were RBG, VGA or whatever but it seemed good idea. Hidden away.

dragon · Post by **dragon** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 11:51 am

I am using a Lilliput 8" VGA TFT (touch screen version) in mine, looks the absolute dogs bollocks, image-wise

robkendall · Post by **robkendall** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 12:54 pm

Gaz
does the touch screen do away with any other HIDs ?(human interface devices)
would be better then, than having mouse, keyboard etc

rgrds
rob