Need suggestions on an In-car computer

[My2ktoy]

Ok....I've been tossing this idea in my head for a while now, and I'd like your thoughts on my plan. Any input is helpful, positive or negative. Here's an idea of what I'm planning:
I want to mount an LCD display where the storage bin above the stereo. Has anyone done this? Have pics? Suggestions on mounting it in there? What size LCD do you recommend? I've seen 6" and 7" VGA LCD's on ebay for about a hundred bucks.

I'm probably going to custom-fabricate the computer box. I'll just take the motherboard tray out of another case, and mount that to a nice wood box, which i can carpet/vinyl. Using an n-force motherboard, because its got on-board high-quality sound and video, so i won't need any expansion cards, so it won't be very thick. Athlon proc, 512mb of RAM. 100gig IDE hard drive in a swappable bay. :)

Another question is the power supply. I can use a standard computer power supply, and use a converter to hook it up to my battery. Any other ways to do this? Anyone know what kind of drain that will put on my battery? (I've got an optima red-top, btw). I can get extra batteries no problem. I'm thinking about hooking up my Gen-2 Optima to supply it power, but i don't know how long it will sustain the charge.

Because of boot time, and so i can play cd's, and radio, I want to leave my stock stereo in. So I plan on getting a 4-channel amp, and running the speakers to that. Use a stereo-microphone to RCA converter cable to get the computer sound into RCA format. Use an RCA switchbox, plug both the deck and the computer sound into it, run that to the amp, that way i can switch back and forth.

Use a voice recognition program to interface with the computer, Dragon 5.0 can do everything i need it to. The only question is if the car will be too loud, but I don't think it will be. I'll probably add another mouse just in case.

This setup is VERY cheap...I can get everything i need for under a grand....and most of it i have sitting around at my house. I just can't see spending two grand on an lcd/dvd deck when for half that i can have 500 albums, 50 movies, and 20 games in my car at all times, no swapping out cd-s, or having to look for them. plus all the other programs i have. If i download an mp3, and it hisses or pops, i can just send it through a couple filters in sound-forge to get rid of them. If I wanted to, i could put a wireless network card in, and park my car next to my building, and I could have wireless access to the internet! How about full GPS, as well! Or maybe some engine management software? Or a full guage readout on the lcd. Or the thousands of other things i could do with it. Thats about it, everyone LEAVE FEEDBACK PLEASE. Thanks!

[SlowPoke]

that sounds really sweet but I dunno how realistic that would be... for one i dont know if you can effieciently cool the atholon in the car. but hey good luck and keep us updated if you do this, props to you

[GTS LAID]

2 people that i know of that are doing this or did this. first is Fourig... and the second is none other than blue bomber... get in touch with them on...

[IRL]

At my work place we managed to get an Duron 600Mhz running for the most part fairly smooth. The biggest issue was obviously cooling...as the system would run flawless for about 5-6 hours, then start freezing up etc...

We ripped apart the comp case, made it as small as possible still allowing for some cooling, and we mounted it in the rear. We threw an ide line to the front for the DVD player that we mounted flush in the glove box.

As for a screen, we went with a 7 1/2 " screen that was molded into the center console of the "project car"...which in this case was a Dodge Viper. :)

We also went with a screen in the rear mounted on the inside of the trunk.

After numerous hours of work, we pulled it off...and it was very functional for a show car...since we could sit outside the car with a wireless keyboard/mouse and controlled the various mp3's, dvd's.

As for everyday functionality...a HUGE pain in the ass. Having a passenger sit through trying to find MP3's to play with a small 7 1/2" screen upfront is pretty much useless. For show its amazing, to replace your current cd player...I say pass. Just do what I do...when I want my computer hooked up to my car, I simply plug RCA cables into my EQ from the headphone out jack on my laptop. The sound is amazing, and its alot more functional since you are looking at a way larger screen on your laptop. :)

If anyone wants to see pics of the setup in the Viper, let me know and I will scan some for you guys...it did look amazing though to say the least. :)

[Archon_Ninja]

I dunno, the 7" screen would be too small for a display. and u just got to worry about the computer components bouncin around. Hard drives don't like to bounced around. and if the car gets really hot, that would probably screw up some of your comp's internals... i saw someone do it in a chevy blazer once, looks sweet, it was in auto sound and security magazine.

[IRL]

If you want you can check out the pics here...


http://www.newcelica.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21974

[My2ktoy]

So a 7" will fit in the bin above the stereo? I'lll llower the resolution far enough that i can see it. (I can make the drivers myself if i have to) I don't think cooling will be a problem, my ath right now runs at 35 degrees celcius, and never goes above 45. (thanks to an 80 dollar heatsink). The advantage of my setup is that there are really no computer parts, mobo, proc, ram, HD. the hard drive is the biggest issue. BRAD- if you read this, what are the shock capabilities on a Maxtor? Maybe i will use a laptop harddrive if an IDE can't handle the shock. I don't think the 7" will be too small, since its all going to be voice activated, all i'm gonna have to do is talk my way through the hard drive. I can even have it speak to me and tell me the files in the directory. (Hello Dave...) Or maybe i'll mount a projector to my roof so i can park in front of a wall and watch movies on the bigscreen! hahaha.
IRL: thanks for the pics, please POST MORE! Thanks to everyone for your feedback...keep 'em coming!

[SilverEclipseGT]

Damn bro!! That would be some SICK ****!!!!! I could deal with sitting in your car and watching a movie on a wall!!!

Let me go poke around for a while and I'll try to figure out what you are looking for as far as shock capabilities...you may very well have hit the nail on the head though: Laptop Drive!
Hey, I know it'd likely be a bit harder to interface, but what about the drives they are starting to use for digicams....those things are MADE to handle shocks like whay you're talking about. I don't know the size on them is the only thing....no way they'd be as big as what you are looking for though I bet.

I'll let you know what I find out about our drives.....

[My2ktoy]

damn, a 100gig ide is around $120 on pricewatch. and a laptop drive is close to $300 for a 40 gig! but i was thinking, the neo in-dash hard drive mp3 player uses an IDE drive, so i know it can be done. i may have to make some kind of shock-absorbant bay to stick the HD in...i could suspend it from springs, and then put thick foam around the HD. The HD might skip on bumps, but the OS and any MP3's i play will be playing out of RAM, so it shouldn't make the MP3 skip, or mess up the computer...as long as the hard drive survives.

[SilverEclipseGT]

The HD might skip on bumps, but the OS and any MP3's i play will be playing out of RAM, so it shouldn't make the MP3 skip, or mess up the computer...as long as the hard drive survives.

Which is where I come in!!

All right B....here's the deal:
I have direct specs as to what one of our current on the market drives will handle. If you want them, I can send them to you...but they may not do you much good. The specs will show us what the drive will take in G's at a certain frequency...namely, they take the drive while it is running, put it on a "vibrating" table(it vibes at a certain freq) and they find out what they can put on the thing before it starts getting non-recoverable data errors.

SO, if you want to make your encloser, and then put an accelerometer on it to see what you are getting back there while you drive around...then we can utilize the specs......OTHERWISE, I can just relate the gist of it to ya':

DEFFINELTY do a soft mount, like what you are talking about above. EXCEPT: Don't cover the bottom(at least) and the top(if possible) with any kind of padding that may increase the amount of heat the drive will hold in....namely, don't cover the PCB on the bottom of the drive as it "vents" heat out of the drive through there.
The consensus here is that if you do it, pack it in from the SIDES of the drive pretty secure with some padding and you should be cool. Although, if it were me(since I wouldn't want to spend the $$ for a new drive very often) I'd still design the eclosure so that it has a "shock" set-up of its own, ie springs etc.
Basically, as long as you aren't hopping curbs or doing anything that is gonna cause the head to come off the disk and slap down(making an error on the disk) you should be cool. Any vibes you are getting back there are gonna be at low freqs, and you shouldn't have much problem.....of course I hadn't really considered untill just now the effects of your subs on the operating....but again, if you pack the drive in something that will help absorb those waves, you should be cool.

Also, it might be wise if you are going to enclose the thing in pretty tight quarters, to do something to help keep it cool..but that isn't a huge issue either...jsut a little extra to think about. I think the only kind of situation you'll get in while driving that would REALLY jack up that drive would be if you slammed your car into a wall or something....in which case you have a LOT more to worry about than your HD in the trunk.

Hope that helps.

[My2ktoy]

Yes, thanks a bunch Brad...pretty much in line with what i was thinking. The exact specs aren't important, since i have no idea what frequency it'll be vibrating at...unless you count the subs! But yeah, the subs are going to be another problem...so i'm still debating. perhaps mounting the computer UNDER the subs might help? Cooling shouldn't be a problem, i can mount fans galore around everything if i have to! This seems like it is really quite possible....first step is the LCD! Ebay here i come...

[SilverEclipseGT]

YEAH!!!!

Do it boy!!! Hell, I've seen your place...I know you gotta have most of what you need there!!

I can't wait to see if this works for you!

[GTS LAID]

by the way guys just to let you know and i dont know if this helps... i had my neo mounted on the back seat of the car held by 2 screws on top... with the suspension in my car (TEIN 4 clicks from full hard) it was taking a beating... not to mention that every time i went over a bump it would smack full blast against the bottom end...

8 months... no problems... the drive i'm running in the neo is the IBM deskstar 40GB harddrive... the way it sits in the neo is using these little rubber spacers that hold it in place.. it doesnt attach anywhere to the metal...

[My2ktoy]

GTS LAID: can you take a picture of the mounting on the neo? Have you been happy with it so far? I was thinking about buying one but a computer just seems hella cooler. :)

[Unique Twins]

Just make sure you hard wire it as if you turn off your car you don't crash the computer... my first thoughts... then you need a wireless internet hook-up.. hehe :) that would be cool

[Blue Bomber]

I think the biggest reason GTS LAID's drive has lasted so long is that it's mounted sideways, so bumps don't make the read/write heads hit the platters in the hard drive. As you can see, there is very little room in between them:

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/hard-disk10.jpg

What I'm working on isn't exactly a computer, just a home DVD/MP3 unit that I'm tossing in the back of my car.

[Fourgig]

I want to mount an LCD display where the storage bin above the stereo. Has anyone done this? Have pics? Suggestions on mounting it in there? What size LCD do you recommend? I've seen 6" and 7" VGA LCD's on ebay for about a hundred bucks.

I haven't mounted my LCD in the dash yet, so I don't have any suggestions. I'm going to mount the LCD where the stock stereo is and put an aftermarket HU in the storage bin. I suggest that you think seriously about getting a VGA LCD, not a NTSC LCD like everyone (including me) has. An NTSC screen is nice and dandy if all you use it for is Winamp and DVD's, but if you're even thinking about using the computer for anything else, you'll wish you had VGA. Hell, you'll be hating life even if you're just trying to set up the display properties! The maximum screen size you can use on a NTSC screen is 640x480. The resolution is actually something like 320x240 so text is almost illegible unless you crank the font size way up. I set the screen fonts to at least 14point and the desktop icons are set to huge. A small VGA LCD in the 6 to 9" range will cost an arm and a leg but in the end, I think it's worth it.

I'll just take the motherboard tray out of another case, and mount that to a nice wood box, which i can carpet/vinyl.

That's pretty much what I did, except I mounted the wood panel with all the computer parts in the spare tire well. The only suggestion I have here is ISOLATE THE HARD DRIVE FROM VIBRATION. I've already killed 3 hard drives. The last one was a 10GB IBM laptop drive that has the highest shock ratings. The funny thing is when I just had a minitower bungie corded in my trunk, the hard drive never crashed. When I moved everything out of the case, that's when the bad sectors start occuring. Then the computer had problems booting...then it never boots. There has always been a great debate about whether you should mount the hard drive vertically or horizontally. There's good arguments for both. Personally, I don't think it makes a difference - as long as you mount the HD with some decent shock dampening mechanism.

Another question is the power supply. I can use a standard computer power supply, and use a converter to hook it up to my battery.

That's what I'm doing and it works fine. Or you can get rid of the inverter by getting a DC-DC power supply. Only problem is you wouldn't be able to use the computer in the house unless you have a car battery in your room. ;)

Because of boot time, and so i can play cd's, and radio, I want to leave my stock stereo in. So I plan on getting a 4-channel amp, and running the speakers to that. Use a stereo-microphone to RCA converter cable to get the computer sound into RCA format. Use an RCA switchbox, plug both the deck and the computer sound into it, run that to the amp, that way i can switch back and forth.

You could save yourself some installation hassle and just buy the auxillary audio-in adapter that Blitzsafe sells. It plugs into the CD-changer socket on the back of the stock stereo and you switch to it by pressing the CD button on the stereo. But if you were planning on getting the amp anyway, forget what I just said.

Use a voice recognition program to interface with the computer, Dragon 5.0 can do everything i need it to.

Tried it. Looked good on paper. Will be very hard to get working correctly. The problem is you're in a small enclosed space, so any sound will get picked up by the mic. Current voice recognition programs just aren't sophisticated enough to tell whether it's you giving a command, your passenger talking to you, an ad on the radio...you get the idea. Hell, I've had the computer shut itself down once cause of wind noise. :) My theory is you need mic-in and audio-out controlled by a button. When it's not pressed, audio-out (sound from the computer) comes through and mic input is shut off. When you press the button, audio-out is muted and mic input is turned on. What this does is shut off the mic until you want to give a voice commmand and also minimize the ambient noise when the mic is on. Dunno if it'll actually work though.


GPS navigation is definately a must. Look at Copilot 2002. You have to buy their GPS and software together but it's THE best in-car navigation system. I'm just using a Garmin EMap and Microsoft Streets & Trips. It's not the best solution, but it works. Wireless internet would be cool. I don't need to be that connected so I haven't done that yet. Wireless network would be cool too...*cough*war driving*cough*. Engine management would be sweet. I've been trying to justify buying an ODBII reader so that I can see my engine stats as I drive. You could plug in a TV card if your passenger just HAD to watch a show. I've been trying to figure out how I'm gonna get DirectTV in a moving car. ;)

Hey, if anyone knows how to boot and run Win98 and installed programs off of a CD (as in no hard drive), please let mme know!

[My2ktoy]

Originally posted by Fourgig


Tried it. Looked good on paper. Will be very hard to get working correctly. The problem is you're in a small enclosed space, so any sound will get picked up by the mic.

I think i've found a solution to this problem...a high-quality microphone. My mother uses Dragon for everything, and we got her a nice high-quality USB microphone. Its a funky design on the mic, but it can actually eliminate background noise. It works great. I can listen to music or talk to my father in the same room as my mother, and she doesn't have any problems. I forget the name of it, i'll have to check.

Hey, if anyone knows how to boot and run Win98 and installed programs off of a CD (as in no hard drive), please let mme know!
I don't know how you would do this...you would need CRAZY amounts of RAM in your machine, since everything would need to be running from RAM. Some suggestions: try using norton ghost. you can make a "ghost image" of your HD, burn it on cd. But you'd have to load it into RAM every time you turned on the machine. YOu could do this probably with RAMDRIVE. Since you're running a DOS-based OS, you could write your own autoexec.bat and config.sys on the CD that would create a RAMDRIVE, copy the data to it, then boot off of that "drive." You'd probably need a gig of RAM, though.

The boot time is one reason i'm going to be installing BeOS on the computer as well as windows. BeOS boots in about twenty seconds flat, and works perfectly every time. only problem is that i dont know how good the GNU voice recognition programs are. plus, BeOS is small enough that you can fit a bootable version on a floppy. :)

[Blue Bomber]

How about using Compact Flash Type II cards? Supposedly, they'll be coming out with 2 and 10GB cards soon. Kinda pricey, but you'll never have to worry about hard drive crashes.

[My2ktoy]

I thought about compact flash....but i'm talking like 100 gigs of storage. thats how many mp3's and divx rips i have.

[Fourgig]

Most people don't know this, but compact flash and other similar types of storage medium have limited write cycles. It's limited to about 150,000 writes. Sounds like a lot but if you use it as the primary drive, the Windows swap file will kill it in less than 30 minutes.

So you just turn off the swap file. Would help a lot but Windows writes to the registery quite a bit during bootup. You'll still kill the compact flash in short order.

I'm still trying to figure out how to take advantage of using a RAM drive. Memory is cheap so if I have to get a gig of memory, no big deal.

[GTS LAID]

i really dunno guys... 8 months 0 problems and nothing really special...

try mounting it like this:

http://www.radphys.com/pics/photo08.jpg

[Fourgig]

This is what I'm using to get aux audio-in to the stock stereo. Looks like the exact same part as from Blitzsafe.

www.rcainput.com

http://www.rcainput.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/product-toy_aux_v1.jpg

[GTS LAID]

ya looks exactly like mine fourgig

[SilverEclipseGT]

Originally posted by GTS LAID
i really dunno guys... 8 months 0 problems and nothing really special...

try mounting it like this:

http://www.radphys.com/pics/photo08.jpg
I agree....that is the way I would mount it as well: staright up and down. Then, the only time you MIGHT get a head slap is if you REALL jack on the brakes(I doubt that would do it) or get in a crash. In the case of the latter, I think you have more things to worry about than your HD in the trunk.