Project: Car PC

[MarkLP]

Well, i've held back from posting this here as I felt it might get shot down and ripped apart but then I thought a few people might be interested so I will post it.

First basic design

19-04-07, 10:58 AM

19-04-07, 06:17 PM

More Pics:

Can't put anything in the bottom left space because of boot space

Empty Boot space

 

[MarkLP]

And some wireeeeeeees

Slots in perfecto!

This shot makes it look rubbish, but wait till its covered in carpet

Looking into the boot

 

[MarkLP]

19-04-07, 11:42 PM

some more tonight:

 

[MarkLP]

21-04-07, 8:27pm

Tested it today in the car.

Looked abit silly though as I had to connect up a 17" monitor aswell lol!

Need:

Car psu - probably M2-ATX DC-DC
Acoustic Carpet
Touchscreen TFT - probably a lilliput 7" or 8" Going with the dash mount just gotta make something up, shouldn't be too difficult though!

 

[MarkLP]

02-05-2007, 02:56 AM

Small update:

Painted the front of the DVD drive

Primer

Silver

Fixed some padding on the mount for the hard drive.

Still waiting for the acoustic carpet to arrive, then can get it looking respectable!

 

[MarkLP]

02-05-2007, 13:11 PM

This arrived this morning

It turned out to be this!

Which is quite a big sheet!

Cut to size

Stapled on but no holes cut out

 

[MarkLP]

Back stapled on

Holes cut out and stapled

Back

Fan Mounted

DVD-RW Drive put back together and mounted

 

[MarkLP]

In the car

Light isn't very good, looks a lot better colour match in real life.

 

[MarkLP]

02-05-07, 11:20 PM

Haven't done much, Just secured the unit in place. It isn't moving around at all now. Once i've got everything fitted ill workout some way of securing the sub aswell, dont like velcro, rips the carpet. The pics make them look rubbish, but they are silver in rl.

Yesterday, 12:41 AM

Bought this 7" TFT

 

[MarkLP]

Today, 01:16 AM

Took out the front middle vents and took it apart ready to mount the tft.

Quite a few parts inside!!

Have to block up the vents so they dont work. So Used some tape and then put some superglue around the edges to seel it.

Left to do:

• Mount everything back on (mobo,hard drive etc) -
• Buy PSU
• Buy Touchscreen TFT - Done
• Fit PSU
• Fit Touchscreen TFT
• Buy USB,VGA extender cables - Done
• Fit All cables from tft to pc and power to amps etc
• Copy rest of music across to hard drive
• Make sure it still works!

Thats up to date as it is at the moment. Should recieve tft and extender cabels I bought sometime next week

Thanks,
Mark

 

[MarkLP]

Think it should look OK dude. Will the sub (magnet) bother the HD from that distance?. I always wondered about the effects of daily road bumps etc on the HD too, are they generally OK with that?.

Edit: Seem to have posted mid-post .

Just in time

The hard drive should be shielded enough, if not protection can always be added. Theres the shielded side of the HDD, 12mm ply, carpet, carpet, 18mm ply. So should be ok

EDIT/ As for bumps etc.. You can see in one of the posts I have added foam padding. Will add more of this when I go to actually fit it for good

 

[MarkLP]

Theres nothing behind the fan and I don't realy want to block up any airflow. This is the 3rd wooden case ive put a pc into and believe me it doesn't get as hot as what its made out to be. Its only a P3 733mhz and after 6 hours of use it wasn't even luke warm. Its not a air tight seal around the box so hot air can escape. Another feature which I looked at was theres a spare speaker grill thats not in use at the top, so that acts as a vent. Will keep you updated.

 

[MarkLP]

Also just a question, why a 48x cd player and not a simple dvd-burner since they're so cheap anyway, would be a shame if you couldnt at least play dvd's in it, my opinion anyhow...

that was only there for a test, now have a dvd-rw in place.

 

[MarkLP]

02-05-2007, 02:56 AM


Fixed some padding on the mount for the hard drive.

 

[MarkLP]

mines going to be a bit silly overpowered nf7s with xp2500 mobile.
just what i got lying around

Might have some trouble trying to power that aswell!

 

[MarkLP]

Also as has already been mentioned - get a DVD drive. Makes no sense artificially crippling the system with a CD drive when you're going to all this trouble anyway.

Lol, im sure people only read half the thread. I posted saying theres now a dvd-rw in place. Which means I can play films etc

 

[MarkLP]

I would recommend a piece of software called ezsync which will update all your music/videos when you drive near your house, its awesome!
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/ezsync/

Very Nice

Thanks!

 

[MarkLP]

If I was going to make a carPC I would suspend the hard drives between two short bungee cords, that way they would never suffer sudden jolts as the bungees would just jibble (that's a technical term!) around and absorb the shock, then come back to rest gradually.

Thats something I have thought about but not come up with a reasonable idea. Theres problems of it staying off the wood itself. it would have to be held against sponge or something like that. Then you would have the problems of connecting the bungee cords.

 

[MarkLP]

Well got the screen today, along with the VGA 5M extension cable and the 3M USB extension cable.

Will probably go to fit it sometime this week

Couple of pics and a couple of vids:

Video 1

Video 2

 

[MarkLP]

What are you planning on doing about mounting it so you can take it out the car with you - at the moment that screen looks like it'd leave an awful lot of wires hanging if you disconnected it.

fini

Its going in the middle heater vent, theres a lot of space there for the wires to go, just have to work out some removeable system, which should be fun