Will Slusher.net

YAY!

After much thinking, tinkering, pondering, and planning, my car PC is actually installed in my car!

When I left off with my last update, the test drive had went well, but there were still some issues with placement and integration…

After looking into a number of options, I finally decided the best plan would be to ditch the PCI TV Tuner I had installed and move the PC to a much smaller case that would fit under the passenger’s seat… I did some shopping around and finally decided on this guy from iDot PC. At 2.5″ high, it fit quite nicely…

Since I had lost my TV tuning capabilites, I decided to look into an external USB 2.0 tuner. I did some more searching and finally decided on the MSI VOX TV Box from MSI. I liked the size of the unit and the remote control… and the price… it was a good $30-$30 cheaper than some of the higher end USB 2.0 tuners…

Once those arrived, I turned to the power issues. As I mentioned before, I picked up a little circuit that monitored the ignition voltage and would take care of powering the PC on and off… I just wasn’t sure where to physically install the circuit.

Well, the new case included a DC-DC power supply that was installed beside the motherboard, at the front of the case. Since I already had another power supply that snapped on to the top of the MB, I decided to use that on, and put the power circuit in the case. The mounting holes didn’t exactly line up, but I was able to make a little “adaptor” out of some scrap plexi that worked quite nicely….

Next came the issue of getting power to and from the circuit. I did some more thinking and decided a couple of things.

1) I would like to be able to easilly disconnect the PC and bring it inside for serviceing

2) I would like the power sequencer to also control power for the LCD monitor.

What I ended up doing was picking up a 6-pin molex connector from RadioShack. To that I connected the three power supply wires for the circuit, the two power wires going back to the monitor, and a ground wire, so I could ground the case to the same point as the stereo. Inside the case, I wired up some 2-pin molex connectors, so I could easilly swap power sources. I popped the whole mess out of a pop-out whole left for a spare serial port and put a rubber grommet around it. All in all it turned out really well.

With that part figured out, I turned to rigging a wiring harnass for the PC. It wasn’t to complex. I just measured out the wires, attached one end to another 6-pin connector, and wired the other with the appropriate connectors. I did another 2-pin molex disconnect for the monitor power, just to make installation easier… I wrapped the whole thing with some 1/4″ wire loam, to make it easy to pull through the car….

That pretty much squared away the wiring and power issues (a major hurdle). and with that I turned to mounting the screen. What I finally came up with there was that I would need to build my own custom mount. I had ordered a nice monitor mount that used a ball-joint. I really liked this since it would allow me to adjust the screen in any direction. I decided to remove that portion from the flimsy metal base it came with and build a wooden box to mount it on instead. The wood square would fit in the open 1-DIN bay above the stereo with the monitor mount post sticking out about 2″ to allow a good range of motion.

After putting that together from some 1/2″ poplar stock from Lowes, I decided to get a little creative. For the PC I had picked up a IR wireless keyboard with integrated mouse. I also had picked up a IR repeater so I could put the TV tuner out of sight and still use the remote. I decided to mount both of the IR reciever eyes on the front of the monitor mount, and hide the circuits for them inside the wood frame. For this I had to extend the keyboards eye a bit, but that was fairly trivial….

I also decided to make a plexi glass cover for the whole thing, so all you would see was a sleek black finish…

With all that done, it was finally time to install. I had some some testing before, so the center console between the front seats came out pretty easilly. Pulling the wires from the dash to under the seat also turned out to be fairly easy. I was actually pretty surprised at how quickly everything went in and was connected and working properly…

Well, more or less properly… :)

There were a couple issues with the intital install that took a while to resolve.

First off, I was picking up a nasty alternator whine on the audio input from the PC… A little trial and error led me to discover the ground loop interrupt I had put in was the source of the problem. Once I removed that, things worked like a charm. I also hit some issues with my USB wireless network card and Network Stumbler, the program I use for wardriving. I decided to ditch that card and picked up a NetGear card that I knew was compatible…

The was also an issue trying to use NetStumbler and my GPS navigation software at the same time. Basically both wanted priority access to the COM port the GPS was taking on. I solved this with some software that taked the COM port chatter from the real port and mirrors it to as many virtual ports as you want…. It works pretty well, but causes a few issues with the automatic shutdown. I may have to look into some ways to script a shutdown sequence… *shrug*… Also, there were some final wiring things that I wanted to resolve…

Sooooo, yesterday, I took things back out and now have hopefully really finished the wiring. I basically pulled out my passenger seat to get full access to where the PC will live. I ran most of the wires underneath the carpet, so now there are no visible wires….

I was kinda dumb and didn’t take any pics of the first install, but I took some yesterday. You can find those here:

Car PC Installation Pics

Anyway, there are still some things to work on. I have a higher gain Wi-Fi antenna ordere that will need to be mounted to the roof (I have a neat idea for that) and modded into the NetGear card. I also need to start work on the interface, also, surprisingly, the Windows XP interface isn’t doing a bad job…. But those are projects for another day…

Today, I’m off to Manassas to help a crazy friend of mine set up the massive amounts of home theater equipment he just purchased…. :)

It seems my car PC project has gotten a second wind… :)

As many of you know, one of my long term projects has been to add a nifty little mini-itx PC to my car. The project had, unfortunately kinda fallen by the way side. I had the PC built and running, I had a nice little 7″ LCD touchscreen… I just got stuck figuring out how to integrate it into the car and kinda let the project slip into just being my upstairs television for a while…

A week or so ago though, I decided to start the project back up again. I had purchased several months ago an adaptor to run the PC off the cigarette lighter in my car, but had never gotten around to making a “Y” adaptor so that it could power both the monitor and the PC. The proved to be fairly trivial (except for a brief scare when I accidentially hooked up a 19V power supply to the PC instead of a 12V) and soon I was running the PC and the monitor off the car’s battery! YAY!

After a couple test runs, I was satisfied that the PC and monitor weren’t pulling more power than the Car could handle. Now it was time to turn to other issues… Specifically, the interface, installation and integration, automatic boot up/shut down, GPS Software, Mobile internet… Yeah, quite a list…

Thanks to my sister, the power/auto boot up/shut down problem was pretty easy to solve. She sent me a bunch of mini-PC links, including one for the ITPS-Auto Power Sequencer and Dropout Regulator, which monitors the cars ignition line and simulates hitting the power button when the car is turned on (after the power stabilizes) and does the same when the car is turned off (giving the PC enough time to shut down before cutting power…. pretty cool and fairly cheap. I haven’t tested it yet, but it should work out just fine…

GPS and Networking proved pretty easy too. I did some shopping around and finally decided on iGuidance from iNav Navigation Technologies. A little pricey, but it was highly recommended online and had all the features I wanted.

Networking (in addition to standard 802.11B wireless for war driving, etc) was accomplished using my cell phone, a nifty Mini-Sync Cable from BoxWave Corp, and Datapilot link software from DataPilor link software from Susteen Software. The software and cable allow me to access the internet via the”Vision Web” service included with my cell phone package… pretty sweet and pretty fast to… when I tested it I was connecting at about 230 Kbps…

The interface is still a lingering issue… I tried out Digital Dash from G-NET Computing, but it didn’t perform well on the mini-PC (it took about 15-20 seconds to open the media player… not acceptable). Finally, I think I’ve decided to design my own interface using Talisman 2.71 from LightTEK Software. It seems to be a pretty powerful Windows shell modifier/replacement and has a bunch of nice features (like assigning media player controls to icons, so I can make nice big control buttons for WinAmp/Windows Media Player). That’s all kinda in the design phase right now though, so for the moment I’m stuck with the regular Windows interface…

Anyway, after figureing those things out and getting the various software packages installed, I felt it was time for another test drive… this time with pictures… :) You can check those out here:

Car PC Test Drive Photos.

For the test drive, I basically put the PC in the floorboards and, well, um stuck the LCD monitor stand in the CD player slot… :) I started the car, fired everything up, hooked the audio in via the tape adaptor I used for my iPod, input my girlfriend’s address into the navigation software, and set off following it’s audiable alerts…

I have to say it was pretty sweet… :) The audible alerts (”In… 8… hundered feet, turn right”) weren’t all that obtrusive… and the software did a great job of rerouting me when I missed a turn… I can’t wait to try it out on a longer trip/unfamiliar area….

Next, I turned to integration/installation… Specifically, there are two issues… 1) where to put the screen and 2) where to put the PC…

After a lot of thinking, I decided it would be best to replace the stock stereo in my car with a new, 1-DIN unit, with an AUX input. This would make it much cleaner to get the PCs audio into the sound system, and give me an extra couple inches to rig a mounting bracket for the screen. I did some research and talked to the people at Crutchfield and finally decided on the Alpine CDA-9827. I decided to take care of the installation myself… and, of course, to photo document the process… :) You can check those pics out here:

Stereo Installation.

Things with that went pretty smootly, altho it’s only half installed at the moment ’cause Crutchfield was out of the install kits for my model car… I should be able to pick that up tomorrow… along with the RCA adaptor to get the aux audio input working… The reciever is also XM ready, so if I decided to add that into the mix, I’m ready to go… :)

And that, my friends, was one heck of a long update… :) That pretty much brings you up to date to where I am right now with this project… I’m running into some issue with placing the PC, but hopefully a bit more pondering will yield a solution there… :) I’m just excited that things are working and that I have new toys to play with… :)

Update!: I had another little idea today and decided to put in a little work on it this evening. I was talking with Kristina earlier about the project and the topic of ash trays came up. We both didn’t like the fact that all cars came standard with ash trays. Since not everyone smokes, it would make more sense if there were other options for that area… like a coin holder or something….

Anyway, I did some thinking and realized that that area would be the perfect spot for a little USB hub. I did a little shopping and found a cool little hub from Targus that (after a little cutting ;)) fit perfectly in the ash tray… I had to do a fair bit of cutting on the ash tray, and a little on one piece of the dash, but it wasn’t nothing too major…

Here are a few pictures I took of the mod:

Ash Tray – USB Mod