Carputer

Introduction

Sometime in 2001 I came across some posts where people had started to take some of the newer and smaller form factor PCs and installed them in their car. Thus I began my quest for ideas, software, parts, and money to build one. After about 5 years of collecting and tweaking I finally reached my goal.

Parts

A year or two ago, after a couple of tips on a few forums, I discovered that several people were selling kiosk PCs for amazing prices on eBay. I picked up a Celeron 466 with 256MB RAM, a 20GB HD all in a industrial strength box with power supply. If that isn't cool enough, it was equipped with a 12" backlit color touchscreen LCD all for just $250.

After some evaluation I came to the conclusion that this screen just wouldn't work in my car. For one, it's gigantic and would just look silly mounted anywhere. It also wasn't designed to be separated from the box and doing so would be a giant pain if not completely impossible. I decided to hit up eBay and found a newcomer to the touch screen LCD field. The TM-868 is a $150 8" USB touch screen that supports multiple inputs including VGA, has a wide viewing angle, and already runs on 12V. For a $150 it has been a great screen thus far and I highly recommend it.

To power my carputer I didn't want to use an inverter to convert my car's 12V DC to AC and then back down to DC again with a normal ATX power supply. A guy that goes by the name Mastero sells kits to build your own DC-DC power supply. I picked up his last small form factor kit and built my own power supply. It works great, takes up little space, and provides good clean voltages. If your not good at soldering, OPUS Solutions makes a sweet DC-DC power supply.

The kiosk PC had two free PCI slots so I needed to make the best of them. I didn't want to drag 100ft of Cat5 cable out my front door to my car so Wi-Fi was my first choice. A quick scan through Pricewatch and I had myself a LanReady 802.11b PCI card for $20. It has a high transmit power (100+ mW) and comes with a sweet antenna. The box didn't come with any USB slots which I needed for the LCD so that was the obvious 2nd pick. I chose a cheap USB 2.0 card from New Egg based on the VIA chipset. A couple years ago I picked up a GPS developer board from eBay . It ran me about $40 and is designed for use in moving vehicles. I decided to ditch the board and purchased a cheap (about $20) USB GPS receiver. It turned out to be a good choice and about ten times easier to install.

On a trial run of the system I found the onboard sound to be of horrible quality so I bought a refurbished Creative Sound Blaster USB MP3+ device. I've always been skeptical of a USB sound device but this has made me a believer. The sound is crisp and clear with no background noise and doesn't skip or underrun even on this older PC.