Neil's Car Computer Project

Well this is a short documentary on the progress of my Car PC. In one form or another, I've had some form of car PC or other since 2002, for MP3's. This was adequate to start with, but eventually I realised the potential of having a full computer.

Ok so in the beginning I used my laptop, in the back seat, with a parallel port HD44780 4x20 LCD and buttons using ComCtrl and Winamp.
I don't really have any pictures from those days, except of the LCD soon after I first put it together. (visible with USB to serial adaptor, required since my laptop had no serial ports)


(click to enlarge)

Eventually this progressed as I got sick of taking the laptop in and out of the car all the time, since I had to constantly plug in parallel, USB to serial, audio and power cables (I had a 12V cigarette lighter laptop power adaptor, which turned out to be very unreliable).

And so I started dreaming of having a full PC in the car. I had no idea where to begin really, but around that time I discovered the Epia motherboards, and so that became the basis for the project. I bought an Epia V800 board (old version of the V8000) sometime late 2002, marveling at its tiny size (170mm square).

This was as far as the project got, until I gathered some funds (I'm just a poor student, and at the time I was a pizza delivery driver getting paid.. well.. minimum wage). The next purchase was the hard drive. I decided to go with Seagate, although I don't tend to use them in my desktops, I know they're quiet and quite shock resistant. I considered a laptop drive for extra protection, but decided a 5400RPM desktop drive should be ok. I bought it new because I believed that technology was always advancing re shock protection, so latest is best. So NZ$130 got me a Seagate U-series 40GB disk.

I had 128MB of SDRAM spare already, so used that to initially try out the system. I then started plotting how I was going to mount the hardware into the car. I thought I could stuff it all behind the dash, or in my centre console, but there just wasn't room. I decided it'd have to be under the seat or in the boot, since I didn't want to sacrifice my glove box as I'd seen some people had. Somehow the boot was chosen.

Ok, so next was the biggest obstacle, power! I considered going the inverter way for a little while, DC-DC supplies weren't as available back then. I knew that there were ITX cases that came with 12V supplies, but they were around NZ$200, a little too pricey at the time. Somehow I stumbled on mini-box.com, the home of Ituner Networks, who had just released a supply called the PW60. At US$49 I jumped on this one very quickly, got it shipped over from a friend along with a new 4x40 LCD, as the 4x20 was just a little too small.

Next was the challenge of a case. I was digging through my boxes looking for something it might fit into, when I found an old broken Commodore 64 1541 floppy drive:

It was a little bit too long, but the right width. With the help of a friend, we gutted it out and made it into a case. The motherboard was mounted on to drive rails that we screwed into the bottom, and then the motherboard riser (there are 4) screwed into that:


(click to enlarge)

The hard drive was mounted out to the left, on those screws which come up through the slats, with rubber grommets to absorb some shock. That picture was taken after I took everything else, so there is some of the hot glue remaining that I held the regulator in with. More on that later.

That case was very cool, pity I didn't get any pictures of the setup in it. With the lid on again it looked pretty neat. It went in the car and was used for a while with my LCD setup.

It didn't take long to find that the Epia-V's onboard sounds like rubbish through my car amps. The bass was not very clear, and the whole thing just didn't go very loud. The single PCI slot of the Epia was quickly filled with my Sound Blaster Live Value (4 channel) from my desktop. Problems arose with not being able to put the lid on anymore, since the card stuck straight up. I thought about cutting a hole, but in the end the car pc just sat in the boot with the lid off. Very quickly I discovered that PCI cards NEED to be held in somehow in a car, as the soundcard would often bump out, causing the system to freeze. For this, I wrapped electrical tape right around the case and over the top of the card. This worked well! But looked terrible.

Another problem was that the power supply did NOT like unregulated car power, and the Ituner regulator board (ITPS) had not come to be yet. I made a regulator out of 4 12V 1A LDO linear regulators in parallel (picked these up really cheap):


(click to enlarge)

The other (larger) regulator is a 3A 5V regulator which came out of the original Commodore 1541, I used it for a while to power my hard drive's 5V rail, when I thought that maybe the Ituner didn't have enough grunt (had lots of resetting problems, due to power good dropping, never found out why, still annoys the hell outta me).

Anyway, this setup remained until late 2003, when I was now working at an electronics store and earning a bit of money over the summer break. By now I had discovered I wasn't the only person in the world with a Car PC, and discovered the god-sent mp3car.com which pointed me to MediaEngine, and Xenarc. I had some cash floating about by then, so I simply ordered a Xenarc 700TS touchscreen (after haggling Xenarc Direct's price down a bit, since they were going much cheaper on Ebay, but no-one would ship to New Zealand). It arrived about a week later. I was very excited!

So the new era began. I had a Deluo RS232 GPS mouse that I purchased about a year earlier just for fun, so I decided this should become part of the project too, now that I had a screen. I had already discovered Fugawi, a piece of GPS moving map software. I had to make the maps out of an electronic map book I had, since there was no GPS solution available for NZ at the time. More on this later.

Anyway, I took the Xenarc screen, removed the feet off the bracket, and screwed the bracket straight down on to the top of my ashtray in the dash, then attached the touchscreen on to the front. Sounds so easy when I write about it, but it was an entire night's work to line up the screw holes etc. The touchscreen goes where the LCD and cupholder used to sit. I have a picture of the block I removed, except it has my Alpine head unit in it, which I defaulted back to just before getting the Xenarc because my character LCD was dying (by the way, I dropped the 4x40 LCD on the footpath while taking it from the car, when it was brand new, and smashed it. Terrible luck! So I had to stick with my 4x20).


(click to enlarge)

On the bottom, by the way, were the controls and LED's for the original Car PC. The button on the left was an ATX power switch, the middle was the amp remote lead switch (so I could have the PC on, amps off) and the right was supposed to be a power source selector, as I had a backup sealed lead-acid battery switched by relay to use while I started the car, so the PC wouldn't reboot. That never worked as the PC rebooted when the relay tripped. Would've needed a big capacitor. I now know what I was trying to create was a "tank circuit". In the end, the switch simply cut standby power to the system. There were big bright blue, red and green LED's around the edge of the plexiglass for PC power, amp power and HD activity, and another unusued above the red switch. They looked very cool, making the whole edge of the plexiglass light up. Once again, sorry no pics from those days. The LCD from the top of this page was mounted where the head unit is in that photo.

I also acquired a Creative CIMR100 remote and receiver cheaply on TradeMe, our local version of Ebay. This was installed to the Epia's serial port for controlling Media Engine, which I was yet to install.

Ok so that's a trip back a bit. Now back to the touchscreen age. I got MediaEngine, definitely the best in-car MP3 software out there (and yes, I now know the industry quite well). This was all rigged up and working nicely, but I had a lot of power issues, and control of the PC was difficult since I had to remove the panel with the power switch in order to install the TFT.

Come 2004! A trip to the Colorado, USA in January saw me acquire the Ituner ITPS regulator and power sequencer, a digital camera (Canon PowerShot A70, which took all these photos except the first), a 1F capacitor (just for fun) and some other bits and bobs. Had them all delivered to our hotel room. (If you're interested, visit my Colorado Gallery for pics of that trip).

At this point, the novelty of the Commodore case was wearing off, and I looked for something a bit neater. I bought a VIA Sereniti case (the official Epia case) and removed the power supply, installing my DC-DC supply instead. This held the PCI card much better! It also allowed me to buy a removable hard drive caddy that goes into the 5.25" bay, allowing much faster transfer of MP3s and videos to the car's HD. Finally I have some pics of the computer!





So the ITPS solved the power button problems, as well as some of the problems causing random reboots. I still get a few, but not as many. The PC was then 99% operational from this point, and I used it whenever I went anywhere. Fast forward to now (May) and I finally am making some changes. I've ordered an Opus 90W power supply from MP3Car.com, to retire my PW60 and ITPS. I've read good things about the Opus, the main feature I'm interested in is the ability to keep the system on while cranking. That is on backorder and I'll post more when that arrives.

In the meantime, I made an update that I've been meaning to for a while, adding proper internet and network access. I installed bluetooth and 802.11b USB adaptors to the USB hub under my centre console, where they won't get very good reception, but seem to work ok. This gives me wireless access at home and in the city via CafeNet, our local WiFi provider downtown. Bluetooth gives me GPRS access through my Sony Ericsson T610 mobile phone, but this is too expensive (NZ$10/MB ~US$6) to use for everyday stuff. I also installed a short USB extension up to the top of the centre console, which I will use for connecting a small notebook-sized keyboard I just bought (yet to arrive).

The 11b card is visible here. It's an old one that I modified to have an N connector for connecting long-range antennas. It still has one onboard antenna which gives it fine range in the car. I may buy a new one for the car sometime. Here is the USB hub underneath the handbrake, the bluetooth adaptor is on the bottom, slightly visible.

The touchscreen's USB connector is also connected to this USB hub. All 4 ports are used now. The monitor extension cable joins with the Xenarc's at this point too.

And there is the screen installed. Yes I know it's dirty, I didn't clean anything up before taking this pic. You can see the remote receiver stuck to the left of the dash there, and the remote under the handbrake. I just took a few more pics (it's nighttime, so it's dark...) to give an overall impression of how things look.












Yes I realise everything's a mess. I'll clean things up when the project gets closer to being finished (very soon now!). The last pic shows the GPS stuck high on the back window, the cable yet to be properly routed. I discovered some new GPS software, TUMONZ, which I bought for NZ$100. It covers the entire of NZ, so saves me having to make maps for Fugawi myself. It's ok, but buggy (it's new).

And that's pretty much up to date now. Here's my car:

It's a 1989 Toyota Celica GT-R.

And that's it for now. Post back in a week or so maybe.

System currently consists of:

And the car audio system:

 

No doubt I've made errors here. This page is not proofread :)

Feel free to drop me a line with any comments or whatever:

(yes that's an image, I hate spam)

Or I'm OrangePeel on mp3car.com.