2 Bit Hacker

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Well, I’ve been poking around some more, and come across the Xenarc 700TS. It’s a 7” 16:9 LCD panel with VGA input. I think it will be ideal for the car computer project. I’ve been talking with Dave a bit about it, and he’s talking about putting one in his Explorer. I think in the Focus, we’ll be able to remote the original radio, mount a plate of some sort in it’s place, and attach the panel to that on a swivel mount, so it can be adjusted. This will require no modification to the dash, with is one of the things I really didn’t want to do.

Since the 700TS is a touch panel, it makes interfacing with the computer much easier. I think I’ll probably add one of these for use as a volume control. I think adjusting the volume is one of the most frequently performed operations with a car stereo, so it really doesn’t make sense to fumble with a touch panel to do it.

However, by removing the car stereo, it means the computer needs to be able to do more, and I need to buy an amp to drive the car speakers from the computer’s line out. Also, I need to figure out how to do FM tuning on the computer. Two options present themselves. I could go with a Hauppauge WinTV-radio, which includes a TV tuner, FM tuner, and video input. This would add a bit of flexibility too, since I would be able to connect a camera to the computer as well, perhaps a video review mirror? But, it takes up the only PCI slot on the EPIA board, which I had planned to use for the 802.11b card. I could use a USB 802.11b device at that point, but would probably suffer some performance penalites.

I also found that the D-Link DSB-R100 USB FM tuner is supported in Linux. It’s just got a line-out jack, so I could easily plug it into the line-in on the PC and be all set, but I wouldn’t have any video capability.

Or I could use a different PC to base this whole thing off of, with more PCI slots. But then I’d probably lose the nice 12V DC ATX supply. Choices choices choices. I’ll try to put up a section on chocobo.cx for all this stuff at some point, to keep track of both the car PC and HTPC projects.

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Not having a terribly inspired day at work, but I have been getting some ideas concerning a car computer project. I had originally been thinking of doing
something similar to the DashPC project, but that
requires hacking out part of the console for the touchscreen LCD panel.
Instead, I got to thinking that something like this
would work out well as a display. Then I just hook it up to something
along these lines,
which is powered from 12V, stuck under the passenger seat.

That takes care of display and the PC. I can hookup a serial GPS and stick in a PCI 802.11b card. It would be able to run GpsDrive
and Kismet, as well as be able to playback
CD, Ogg/Vorbis, and MP3 audio. The only thing I need at that point is some
sort of control interface. Maybe my old I-Opener keyboard would work initially.
Though what would I have the pizza button do?

With the network rework coming up this weekends, I wonder if Dave would let me put my old computer on one of the server nets so I could have a server all my own…. Hmm…

Had an idea for a case mod for my new machine. In the drive plates, there’s a grid of square holes. I was thinking I could get some pieces of colored acrylic from a company that Dave R. works with, put those behind the holes, and put a light source behind that to make the front glow. I think it would look pretty slick. It’d also look cool to do that to the air intake in the front, but it would block too much airflow, I think. Maybe if I put a spacer between the acrylic and the front panel….. hmm…..

Could also be used for a window on the side panel, I think. That would look slick too. I’d also like to put some rheostats or something in to limit the fan speed (5 fans mean lots of noise.) Maybe I could do something with my Basic Stamp….