Monday, November 27, 2006 - 09:17 am, by: Benjamin Burgess(Jampac)
Well on the weekend after many hours of wiring, I've got my CarPC all installed and working I've had to wire in an amp at the same time, so that slowed me down some what. Here are some pictures of the build up and install. The PC is mounted under the passenger seat so it’s a little hard to take pictures of it in the car.
http://bburgess.gallery.netspace.net.au/CarPC
Runs really well. System is playing music from a cold boot by the time I have closed the garage door and back in the car. Just got to configure so it goes into hibernate on shutdown, and then it'll be 3x times faster to boot.
I have the factory sub hooked up as well so 2x 6x9" speakers in the rear, 2x 4" speakers in the front (these are noticably weaker), and the 10" factory sub. The factory sub really pumps, surprised at how well it goes. I had to fiddle around with the levels a lot, and also the filtering in the zalman software to get the sound right, especially for the subwoofer.
Touchscreen works great, can navigate by using your finger, but works best with the little pen like device supplied.
The PC is pretty quiet, can't be heard in the car. The fuel pump is louder. The PC has 2 small 4 cm fans on it, one for cpu and one at the front for ventilation.
My wifi antenna at the moment is stuck on the roof of the passenger side. It has a magnetic base and seems to stay in place even when I'm hammering the car.
Monday, November 27, 2006 - 09:31 am, by: Benjamin Burgess(Jampac)
I wanted something I could hide and still have the nice little 1.5din pocket underneath it. When its popped up its about double din size (it does block the view of the climate control), but of course only needs a single din slot.
Monday, November 27, 2006 - 09:42 am, by: Benjamin Burgess(Jampac)
I haven't tried to pull it down manually, always press the button, if doing it manually. It automatically flips back in when +12v switched it shut off. It flips back in pretty quickly. If it were installed at the bottom it would interfere a bit with the shifter. Good thing about its current location is you can rest your wrist on the shifter while navigating the screen.
I'm thinking of trying my hand out at building an interface to the climate control system. I saw a guy in the US on mp3car.com started making an interface to his lexus sc400 that worked on a PC. So I'd be like a emv system then.
Rob Andreacchio Moderator Victoria Supercharged VT Calais & 1991 JZZ30
Monday, November 27, 2006 - 10:33 am, by: Rehan Bandara(Parsec)
Almost all of the A/C controls are boolean, so it shouldn't be too hard. You can also wire them parallel so the A/C front panel works as well...
the temperature set knob may be a bit annoying though. Its discretised, and i'm not sure how or what it sends to the unit. Its on the side though so you don't really have to bother.
You can buy a cheap dio interface from jaycar (i think) and run solid state relays or FETs across all the switches.
Personally, i would do it in labview as then you can build a nice front panel (and interface all your telemetry and stupid automation into it as well)... oh wait, i started talking about me.
Monday, November 27, 2006 - 10:54 am, by: Rehan Bandara(Parsec)
I take it you're a programmer?
You should be able to find something even cheaper without the Ains. You'll probably want to interface something else into them as well though.
rs232 is antiquated and slow, which is why it doesn't have a sampling rate specified for the dios or ains; not a big deal for the dios, but probably crap for the ains. (you can work it out based on the baud rate if its a likely issue)
This card looks cheap enough to interlace the AIN bytestream with the DIO bytestream even if the AINs are unused and unwanted, so that's going to make the digital control slower.... not that it really matters, but it just give the system a clunkier laggy feel if it's percievable.
Rob Andreacchio Moderator Victoria Supercharged VT Calais & 1991 JZZ30
Monday, November 27, 2006 - 11:14 am, by: Benjamin Burgess(Jampac)
I can program a bit in visual basic, pascal and delphi, but that's not my job any more. I deal a little with embedded systems and general electronics these days which I'm trying to get more into. If I get motivated I should be able to learn what I need.
Monday, November 27, 2006 - 01:00 pm, by: Benjamin Burgess(Jampac)
If anyone is interested in the exact items I have fitted to this CarPC including the software, happy to write up a list. A few of the items I have changed during the build due to trial and error.
Monday, November 27, 2006 - 03:52 pm, by: Kim Nguyen(Kim)
List would be cool! I am still thinking about a carpc, don't know how worth while it would be... a friend has a portable hdd type mp3/video box thing I think someone on these forums has something similar... But it plays movies and music and he bought a indash lcd off ebay. But then again you cant use interesting stuff like GPS or play games? lol
I'd only use a car pc if there were no keyboards or touch pads needed to operate it, there's nothing more retarded then having to use a mouse to change tracks or switch the radio or MP3z on. This one here looks quite good though. Hey Ben, what makes the system realise it needs to hibernate when you switch off the car?
Monday, November 27, 2006 - 05:03 pm, by: Benjamin Burgess(Jampac)
I found windows xp can be set to hibernate by default when the power switch is clicked which is what my PSU does for me automatically when 12v switched is turned off. However I've been told to look out for possible boot problems with GPS not working and stuff like that. I know I've seen problems with my engine manangement software if its resumed from hibernate it crashes the software which is probably due to the way windows locks out the com port.
Oh and I've got no keyboard or mouse operating this CarPC, its all touchscreen and virtual keyboard on screen if you need to type in which is pretty rare. I only need a keyboard when searching for a song which frodoplayer has its own search tool with virtual keyboard and my engine management which I found today you can use windows on screen keyboard to control, but it would be easier in this case to just plug in a keyboard if the car was going to be tuned from the CarPC computer.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006 - 11:12 am, by: Benjamin Burgess(Jampac)
Yeah voice recognition would be good. I know there is an addon for map monkey to work voice recognition in, but not sure about freedrive. I actually got freedrive working last night, had to change my version of GPSgate to 2.0. Works awesomely. Was seeing up to 10 satellites from the rear parcel shelf thru the tint, and was very actuate with its measurements of were to turn. Also noticed my speedo is out by about 3km/h at 60km/h.
New episode comes out tonight of heroes, looking forward to it.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006 - 11:28 pm, by: Benjamin Burgess(Jampac)
Ok here is a list of what's in it,
-Via C7 mobo. Comes with c7 processor already on it running at 1.5ghz. Its a active heatsink. Has a tiny 4cm fan that is quiet as. -1 gig of ddr2 533mhz ram (I think you can get away with 256mb. My xp boot memory footprint is 88mb) -120gb 5400rpm 2.5" HD. I did try using a CF card to boot from, but after 3 adapters, its slow and it just doesn't work properly. Save your money for a real HD. -cardbus + cf adapter riser for mobo. (I use my wifi card on this) -Zalman USB sound card. (This is going in the bin. Its a heap of ••••• The software is rubbish at filtering. I'm currently using the onboard sound which runs perfectly, but no sub, so going to get an audigy 2 to replace the zalman so i got sub woofer again). -D-link fm radio. (Not really fan of this thing as it outputs to the same card it inputs to, which means you can't input via mobo and out via a usb sound. Other than that works with radiator fine). -ebay 7" motorized single din touchscreen. (screen is good, three problems I have found with it. 1. It can sometimes flip up in the wrong position as it remembers your last flip position which is adjustable. 2. the touchscreen driver doesn't work out of the box. You need to make adjustments in the driver, •••••• if i know why. 3. Once driver is going, it works 99% of the time. Sometimes it can do some weird ••••• but seeing less and less of this). -Garmin GPS18 usb GPS. Nice unit, very fast at updating the gps signal to the PC. Only 1 problem, out of the box it only works with garmin software until you get a program called gpsgate 2.0 that can make a garmin emulate a com port and nmea code. After this it works on any software you throw at it, including netstumbler Thats right I could track every single unsecure wireless network in sydney -Senao NL-2500 prism mercury wifi cardbus adapter. This is a 100mw model, a/b only. Its a long range card. This works with netstumbler and can be used with two external MMCX connector antennas. This means you can use a directional and an omni for best coverage. I currently only have a omni which I brought off ebay that has a magnet on the bottom and is stuck on the roof. -Vroom PC enclosure. Its like a small amp enclosure. Very tough, but also very limited for space. Its tight inside that case, but hardware is well protected. -M2-ATX DC-DC psu. This has worked awesomely. Has a programmable PIC microcontroller on it so you can set the startup delay, shutdown delay, hard off etc timers. It works out to be around 93% efficient at 14volts. Has no problems with cranking or anything like that. -Random assortment of cables, lots of them. -5 channel a/d/l amp off ebay. Works pretty good for 120 bucks. Have no problems controlling levels and getting nice sound. It pumps the factory sub pretty hard.
Software, -Destinator 3 using freedrive interface. This works pretty good. Its better than map monkey. -GPSgate 2.0. This is my garmin/com/nmea emulator. I found gpsgate doesn't like coming back from hibernate, so I'm going to write a small program to get around this problem. Seems to be only program that screws up, wifi, touchscreen, sound were all ok. -Frodoplayer 1.09 take 3 using a celica skin which I modified to say toyota soarer. This is the main interface that loads when windows xp boots. -PowerMod engine management software -Netstumbler -Firefox for surfing the web -I used xplite to strip down windows xp install and speed it up. -I used autopatcher to patch windows xp and also to massively speed up windows with its small tweaks. -windows xp sp2 (original release) install with autopatcher october update.
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Thats right I could track every single unsecure wireless network in sydney 
