A PC in your car, anyone?

[hsv_rulz]

Have been looking into this for a while, and came across this unit seems perfect for the Monaro

http://jvidsmofd.en.ec21.com/product_

[Island boy HSV]

I have a PC in my car. I did it as a bit of a project, wanted touch screen controls GPS, MP3 and Video.
It has been finished for a couple of years now and still works fine. When I produced it there were a couple of in dash units but they suffered from heat issues.

Here are a couple of pictures of it.





The screen now has a surround around it.

The PC boots in about 25 seconds from turning the ignition on and resumes what it was doing last playing MP3/video etc.

Edited by Island boy HSV on Friday 15th August 15:02

[Demolition Man]

Website said:

.....Please note: Holden Commodore VT-VX and VY-VZ have non-standard 2DIN dash opening that is 10mm higher than standard 2DIN unit, you cannot install standard 2DIN unit in these car models without need for spacers and special trim plate or facia.

[hsv_rulz]

I too have been toying with this idea, so I bit the bullet and have ordered one of these.

www.revo-sys.com/CarPC_Pre-built_Systems.php?PHPSESSID=cbdea9ee351d8b08d4de7e5dd8142258

also intend to add a usb dab rx, a usb DVB-T rx and a large capacity usb hdd for mp3, video and games? storage.

Are you happy with your setup IslandBoy? Any things you would like to change/add or do differently?
Also what frontend do you use, CentraFuse, RoadRunner or just do everything from Windows?

[hsv_rulz]

Demolition Man said:

Website said:

.....Please note: Holden Commodore VT-VX and VY-VZ have non-standard 2DIN dash opening that is 10mm higher than standard 2DIN unit, you cannot install standard 2DIN unit in these car models without need for spacers and special trim plate or facia.

Yes, you are correct, but I think most of us here know this, which is why you need fascia adapters like the ChimChim thingy from the states or the one I ordered

www.caraudiodirect.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=CEL-AFC5721++&x=10&y=2

[Island boy HSV]

I am using road runner as a front end, which is great. The amount of skins allow you to customise the look without any work. I have a wifi card so I can transfer music and video from the house to the car. The only thing that I would change is the audio output. I think you need a dedicated sound card although the standard stuff on the mother board is ok. I am using prime nav as the sat nav- its good but your need to use a keyboard to enter place names.

From a reliability point of view I went for a server grade hard drive and shock mounted it inside the case. I also got rid of the CPU fan and replaced it with a large heat sink. The CPU fan and the hard drive are most vulnerable parts in my opinion. I had reservations about the double din units when I was looking round a couple of years back as they were having heat related problems, mostly miss operation of the touch screen when the unit gets hot.

[hsv_rulz]

Island boy HSV said:

I am using road runner as a front end, which is great. The amount of skins allow you to customise the look without any work.

I have tried several times to install RoadRunner on WinXP and Vista, always with the same result - says it can't find a file in the installation path, but I don't know what file it is looking for. Followed the install from the readme, still same result???
Could you poss give me a clue what it might be whining about or a howto, so I can get it working? Did you have probs installing and config'ing this little beasty?

[davegreg]

A PC! I still haven't even used the stereo in my Monaro yet!

[anonymous-user]

I like the idea of having the car pc connect to the cars obd port running hptuners or efilive ... real time data logging of the cars performance

You could link in a microphone to pick up the engine note(and video..) record an entire trip and play it back on your HD TV at home

[SS HSV]

Island boy HSV said:

I am using road runner as a front end, which is great. The amount of skins allow you to customise the look without any work. I have a wifi card so I can transfer music and video from the house to the car. The only thing that I would change is the audio output. I think you need a dedicated sound card although the standard stuff on the mother board is ok. I am using prime nav as the sat nav- its good but your need to use a keyboard to enter place names.

From a reliability point of view I went for a server grade hard drive and shock mounted it inside the case. I also got rid of the CPU fan and replaced it with a large heat sink. The CPU fan and the hard drive are most vulnerable parts in my opinion. I had reservations about the double din units when I was looking round a couple of years back as they were having heat related problems, mostly miss operation of the touch screen when the unit gets hot.

Thats a very neat install. Is that a floppy drive?

[geek_mode]

I have done a couple of installs for friends and the heat was an issue but we did as you have done and mounted the PC under the dash in the glovebox. I kept it cool with an 92mm case fan which had an aluminium chassis which itself acted as a heat sink. I screwed this to the lid of the pc but with a, 90mm cutout in the top of the box and to make it silent it was fed off the 5volt rail of the power supply instead of the 12v rail so it runs slower. For storage we didn't go down the server drive route but instead used a compact flash to IDE adaptor and a Bluray drive from a laptop for movies and storage of mp3. There are two 16 gigabyte compact flash memory cards; one for him and one for her, so all they do is load the correct flash card when they get in the car and it loads the colour scheme, music, video etc as a completely different operating system. Here's a clever touch.. if either of them gets a new telephone number it is automatically synchronized with Nokia suite via the Bluetooth dongle.. when the car gets back home, the car PC then synchs with the house PC so all the telephone numbers are update.. because they have 'his and hers' flash mem cards, they both keep their numbers seperate. If this system crashes they just ghost over another image to the card.. it takes minutes to rebuild.. how is that?

Software wise I used XP embedded which was a royal pain in the arse for drivers but I managed to get it all working ok.. front end was a SCADA front end which he designed using WinCC

The GPS unit uses Nokia maps which is really good and we also used a bluetooth dongle so that you can input your destinations via a Nokia foldable Bluetooth keyboard which looks and works really well. As the driver was written for a phone it works perfectly with XP Embedded as some tablet phones use it.

On one of the install the PC has an embedded 3G card with SIMcard, so my friend can access his CCTV on the house when he is not at home, also he can access both the reversing camera and the covert in-car camera from his house, and he can stream live audio from the car to the house and vice versa

As for sound, that is his next upgrade as he want a proper 5:1 install to accompany the video For that I have looked and as the space is an issue, you cannot use PCI cards. If you search ebay for Trust USB sound card, you will see a half decent one with 5.1 for about £30. The beauty of USB is that you hide the units elsewhere and not have to cram everything into one area.

I think it's only a matter of time before all car audio/video systems go this way.. this is the future chaps, although you won't recognise the fact that your Kenwood, Pioneer Alpine etc player has a PC inside it, I think it will be a remote box and a posh high-end dash mounted screen much as these are

[/geek_mode]

[hsv_rulz]

hsv_rulz said:

Island boy HSV said:

I am using road runner as a front end, which is great. The amount of skins allow you to customise the look without any work.

I have tried several times to install RoadRunner on WinXP and Vista, always with the same result - says it can't find a file in the installation path, but I don't know what file it is looking for. Followed the install from the readme, still same result???
Could you poss give me a clue what it might be whining about or a howto, so I can get it working? Did you have probs installing and config'ing this little beasty?

Eventually figured out the problem - anti virus says RR contains a trojan and deletes the .exe. After configuring the antivirus to ignore the file, it runs ok, but doesn't seem to be happy with Vista.

[Island boy HSV]

Just looked at the forum, good to here you have road runner sorted. I run mine on cut down version of XP. It is very stable going in and out of hibernate every time the car is driven.

[hsv_rulz]

I have now fitted the PC I bought from the states. The unit has a 1.6Ghz Dual core processor, 1Gb ram, 120 and 320Gb hard drives and DVD/CD writer. It has Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, FM and DAB radio, Digital TV, plays DVD, Video, MP3, etc, etc...
Here's a few pics


Installed

Main Menu

Menu pg2

Menu pg3

Internet Explorer

Mp3 player

Sat Nav

It's all working, except the infrared control from steering wheel switches (hardware works, just can't figure out how to configure the software )

[madmunky]

Sweet, Centrafuse. I'm building one at the moment in my Supra and once thats done will be doing one in the holden (when I get it back).

Now thats there is good sat nav software (iGO) for the PC I seems like a good idea. Im using laptops connected to 7" touch screen for mine I was hoping to also connect it to the cars OBD port but I understand this isnt standard on my GTS

Look good though, any pictures of the GTS with the screen fitted correctly?

[hsv_rulz]

Yes, Centrafuse. I tried most of the other frontends around, but found them all lacking in some way, not all features I wanted supported, or just plain difficult to use. I found Frodoplayer to work ok 'out of the box' but could not get the phone to work, Roadrunner is prob best of the 'freebies', but again phone was the problem. I tried the trial version of Centrafuse and found everything I wanted, easy to configure and it all works - so I lashed out and bought the full version.
Like I said earlier, I am trying to get 'Eventghost' to send keyboard 'hotkeys' to CF, it recieves the IR commands from the steering wheel buttons ok, so I need to configure it to send the hotkeys, but so far have not figured out how. I've scoured the net for tutorials, etc, but come up blank so far. So, if any one knows, any help would be appreciated.

[madmunky]

I brought Centrafuse too, When I get the car back ill start to work on the PC install again.

What screen did you get, I've found some cheap (£90) 7" ones on ebay.

[hsv_rulz]

It's a full indash unit, see linky

www.revo-sys.com/revosys_x300_double_din_carpc.php?PHPSESSID=cbdea9ee351d8b08d4de7e5dd8142258

Edited by hsv_rulz on Sunday 7th December 21:38

[Island boy HSV]

Centrefuse looks good to me, will have to look into upgrading mine. Roadrunner is ok but a bit dated now by comparison and with integrated sat nav it looks great. Is there a virtual keyboard with the sat nav on Centrafuse? Is it possible to have a picture please.

[madmunky]

Centrafuse will run different sat nav software so it will depend on what you use. Personally I will be using iGo but you can make TomTom work also.

[hsv_rulz]

Island boy HSV said:

Centrefuse looks good to me, will have to look into upgrading mine. Roadrunner is ok but a bit dated now by comparison and with integrated sat nav it looks great. Is there a virtual keyboard with the sat nav on Centrafuse? Is it possible to have a picture please.

Centrafuse's integrated nav is Destinator and it does have on screen keyboard. I also have Garmin installed, which doesn't have an OSK - but I have seen a hack someone has come up with that provides one for Garmin, but have not tried it. At the mo' I tend to stick with Destinator. Once I sort out the IR issues, I may give Garmin a play.
I can post a few pics of destinator's osk next week when I get home.