| My Car PC
Project April 25.2004 Overview: This is just a personal project of mine I've been
thinking about for some time and finally had the money and time to do it.
Pics of Now, Before Install (as of now, still waiting on parts..) |
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Just my center dash and my pioneer deck. no mods
Again, all factory
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Requirements of MY Car PC: -Mp3 Playback -DVD Playback (=dvd drive, fast enough proc. to handle dvd) -Small Form Factor -Prebuilt (Crunched for time lately) -Easy power situation/limited wiring -Touchscreen Input -GPS Upgradeable -Rear Camera Upgradeable -Integrated into car/secured design (not too flashy to get stolen!) |
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Items Purchased: |
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Lilliput 7" Touchscreen LCD
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Minibook PC 1.3Ghz, 10GB HD, DVD-ROM
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Mount Kit For LCD
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DC Auto Laptop Adapter (power to minibook)
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3 Socket Adapter for Cig
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Test Pics/Prelimin Setup and Diagrams |
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Just my touchscreen hooked up to my laptop to test quality and touchscreen when in car. Works great so far!
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My first idea
for mounting was to put the pc in my ash tray area by cig lighter but
realized that would be too in the open (security issue there) so i decided
that i'm going to mount my minibook in my center console, and run
wires to lcd and deck in console. wish me luck! might add a usb hub under
my deck so i can just plug in gps and digital camera and etc!! Probably will be some custom work i'll have to do and some cutting/drilling of my factory console (might have to get an extra just in case, haha!)
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A Prelimin Diagram of wirings. Click for Thumbnail for fullscreen shot.
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The Problem of Input in a Car PC and just using a Touchscreen with Windows XP |
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| One thing that
kind of kept me away from this project earlier was the idea of input into
the pc. a year ago, touch screen lcds with vga input were super
expensive but now they've came down to a very reasonable $200-300 price
range. But even with touch screen there is an issue of using Windows
with only touching and no keyboard (you might want to have one, i'm think
of a nice lil mini usb keyboard (guess i'm going to do the hub mod now!_.
There a prob. quite a few ways and programs but my shell replacement of
choice is going to be Stardock DesktopX 2.0.
This baby lets you do quite a bit of cool things with your desktop and windows shell. i created a pure touchscreen friendly interface from existing theme (the swift theme). Below is a screen shot of my desktop at 800x600 resolution. The screenshot doesn't do it justice since the cube in the middle always rotates and the winamp icon does to (both 3d objects). If you want a copy of it, drop me an email at [email protected] |
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| So thats all for now, i'll post
more next week once i get my pc setup and going and my wiring and power
situation figured out. Peace seamonkey420 |
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