Meissen's Project 8" CarPC

[meissen]

What he's talking about is the power supply from MP3Car.com that I told you about in the shoutbox.

[SoulTerror]

Oh ok. Not sure how I'd I get that to work for the laptop. Might be able to just cut the wires and rig something up.

[98blackbeauty]

it was a special power board that we bought for the project.

[MeenZ28]

Brian, what ever happened to this set-up? Did you sell it off or is it laying around somewhere? This was my favorite incarnation of the in dash PC you did. I'm still a bigger fan of the 93-96 dash and I thought you did an awsome job of gwetting it to look "factory"

[white97z28]

god i wish i was smart enough to do this...ill prob just have to stick to a double din touch screen radio lol

[MunsterZ28]

touch screens lol ill stick to my knobs and buttons and a simple cd player

[meissen]

Brian, what ever happened to this set-up? Did you sell it off or is it laying around somewhere? This was my favorite incarnation of the in dash PC you did. I'm still a bigger fan of the 93-96 dash and I thought you did an awsome job of gwetting it to look "factory"

I have some parts [of the dash] still laying around. The carPC itself had to be dismantled/dissected and then built into the 97+ dash setup. It was a nice setup but I really like the way the 97+ dash works with the carPC a lot more. It's nice to be able to just pop the radio bezel out of the dash (with the LCD) and then have access to all the insides of the carPC.

[Fbomb]

touch screens lol ill stick to my knobs and buttons and a simple cd player

Psh. Stick to my toggle switches.

[MunsterZ28]

Psh. Stick to my toggle switches.

QFT i cant even hear my radio anymore unless its at an incredible loud setting. my music is my exhaust

[SoulTerror]

Listening to the exhaust get's boring when most of my ride to work is highway.

[Emulsifide]

Damn, why didn't I look at this sooner?! Nice system man! I've been making carputer systems for over a decade at this point. My first one was based off of a TV internet set-top computer (http://www.linux-hacker.net/websurfer/ws.html) that I turned into an XPLite running machine. It was all controlled from a Handspring Visor PDA (a Palm 3rd party PDA maker) that drove a plugin to winamp. Wild system for the time (1999). Using XPLite, I was able to nail down 11 second boot times with the Cyrix MediaGX 266MHz processor and 48MB of ram. lol!

After a couple years, I decided to 1 up my old system and go balls out for my red Cavalier. 7" dash touchscreen, headrest LCDs, dolby DTS 5.1 surround sound (Sherwood decoder and a true 5 channel setup), Athlon XP cpu, in dash DVD drive, a beefy geforce 4 ti4200 graphics card, etc. Awesome system and a lot of fun to show off at car shows. I also had an OBD program hooked up to it that gave an additional set of gauges to monitor temps and other stuff going on with the car. Very trick system that helped me place in my class at Street Dreams 3 back in 2003. There's a couple pics here: http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/show...er-z-24-a.html . Unfortunately, all of the good build pictures have been taken offline.

Software wise, what do you plan on doing with your system? What kind of functionality are you going for?

I've been considering building something again for my Camaro, but I don't know. It's sooooo much easier to buy a double din multimedia system and slap it into a car nowadays. I'd seriously consider doing a carputer again if Microsoft licensed Sync out to OEMs and the general public was able to get a hold of it. Through my job, I have Windows 7 embedded available to me, but I don't see a point to using it. Sync's instant information database would be totally worth it, but GPS, video, blah blah blah is all available from all of the stereo manufacturers now.

Sorry to jack your thread a little. I'm just geeked that you're into doing this too.

[meissen]

Haha pretty cool, Andy! My CarPC has Road Runner as the frontend app and which interfaces with Winamp and iGuidance GPS nav. Most of the time when I use the carPC now, though, I have it running live data logging from the OBD port showing me all the stats for the o2s, temps, etc.