My In-Dash Car PC project

TheForce · 05-30-2007, 08:04 PM

I purchased the parts for the PC today.

I updated my first post with the parts information.

I also bought some cables and other stuff. I don't really think I need to mention what they are.

Cheap! · 05-30-2007, 08:11 PM

Let me know if you are going to do a mount in the back of your car like I did. I have an idea that involves a lot less cutting and loss of material from the back wall. It should keep your car quieter.

TheForce · 05-30-2007, 08:21 PM

I'm thinking about putting it in the lower cargo area but I'm accepting any ideas. The case I'm getting is larger than yours. So I'm a little tight on space. I do want it out of the way. I want to be able to use my trunk fully without problems.

Cheap! · 05-31-2007, 10:42 AM

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(theforce @ May 30 2007, 07:21 PM) [snapback]452417[/snapback]</div>

Quote:

I'm thinking about putting it in the lower cargo area but I'm accepting any ideas. The case I'm getting is larger than yours. So I'm a little tight on space. I do want it out of the way. I want to be able to use my trunk fully without problems.
[/b]

Since your not adding a PHEV conversion (yet?), I think the lower cargo area would be best and you can always move it later.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(theforce @ May 30 2007, 07:21 PM) [snapback]452417[/snapback]</div>

Quote:

I'm thinking about putting it in the lower cargo area but I'm accepting any ideas. The case I'm getting is larger than yours. So I'm a little tight on space. I do want it out of the way. I want to be able to use my trunk fully without problems.
[/b]

Since your not adding a PHEV conversion (yet?), I think the lower cargo area would be best and you can always move it later.

TheForce · 06-07-2007, 10:51 PM

Here is a quick update.

I have the PC put together and its currently running on the bench with an ATX power supply acting as the virtual prius battery.

Windows XP is up and running with all addons working.

God I hate Linux

I actually love linux but its such a PITA. I installed Fedora 7 and its by far the best linux distro out there. It recognized everything that was built onto the motherboard. The only other distro that I tried that did that was RedHat 9. Of course I havnt tried any others since RH9. I'm having problems finding some drivers for the GPS, USB wireless A/B/G adapter, and my nvidia video card. The nvidia driver shouldn't be that hard to find. I tried the one on nvidia's site but the current driver did not support my card. I think I may have to find an older version. Or I may try to see if I can force 800x480 resolution with the current generic drivers. I still want to try to get the nvidia drivers installed because it might speed things up a little with real drivers. I also have to make a linux boot CD so I can get rid of GRUB.

I had to do a little modifications to the case and other parts to get everything to fit in that small area.
Since I have two 120gb drive in raid 1 I had to make a little more room. The two stackable drive bay I bought was either nonstandard or the case was non standard or both. None of the holes lined up to mount the drive in the extra bay slot in the upper right hand side of the case. I had to drill an extra hole on the mounting plate of the case. No biggie. Then I realized that the video card had to be in the bottom PCI slot of the PCI riser card. This meant I had to either find a new location for the 2 hard drives or split them. I decided to split them. One will be in the regular IDE hard drive bay beside the power supply and the other left in the current spot.

My video card that I bought was a little defective. The push down plastic clamp that keep the heat sink on was not fully depressed. It was blocked by a little bit of solder in the hole. Stupid me decides the best way to open the hole was to stick a small screwdriver in it and chisel it out a little. Some how a CAP popped off of the rear side of the GPU. I was like $#!! and it had to be one of those little surface mount ones to.

I decided it could not get any worse and got out my soldering iron. I hate soldering SMD components. In fact I'm better at desoldering them than actually soldering them. I got out my very fine silver solder and went to work. about an hour later I had it secured to the board and I checked it with my multimeter. Looks like I got all 8 leads connected to the right place. So far I havnt seen any video problems. I also desoldered the crap that was in that hole. The heat sink is now secured to the board.

HD0 is at the upper middle and HD1 is at the right under the video card. You can just barely see it. I put a strip of metal on the USB ports in PCI slot 2 to keep it from moving inward when inserting USB devices. This case does not have anything to hold down the PCI plates so I had to rig this thing up.

TheForce · 06-12-2007, 01:53 PM

Another update.

I'm currently getting my windows OS fully installed and working with a front end. I decided on RoadRunner with the DigitalFX 2.0 skin.

So far everything works except for a little problem. When I try to use my DVD drive it seems to kill a hard drive. Every time the DVD drive tries to access the DVD the hard drive sounds like it powered off. Sounds like a *CLICK* and a spin down. I have also seen it do this when accessing my USB TV tuner only it fully locks the computer when it clicks. I can only think of 2 possibilities. One being that I'm using an ATX power supply to run the car PC while its out side the car and its not providing enough power to the PC. The second being that the hard drive may be bad. I can only hear one of the drives click so it may be that it is a bad drive. I hope not but since having two drives in a raid 1 I wont mind shipping one hard drive off to get it replace.

I'm currently running Spinrite on the drives now just to make sure they are OK on the SMART end.

jamesl · 06-12-2007, 03:25 PM

Very nice project.....

Tell me do you plan on having Wireless network support?

TheForce · 06-12-2007, 04:14 PM

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(JamesL @ Jun 12 2007, 03:25 PM) [snapback]460342[/snapback]</div>

Quote:

Very nice project.....

Tell me do you plan on having Wireless network support?
[/b]

I have A/B/G/BlueTooth and I might get some king of wireless data plan so I can have internet as I drive

Here is an update on the hard drive issue.

I failed both of my drives one at a time and booted into windows. Both drives did the click of doom when accessing the DVD drive and TV tuner. I also got out my spare sealed lead acid batteries and hooked them up just so the PC could get all the amps it needed straight from the battery just like if were installed in my car. This did not make a difference either. The thing is I did not have this problem until recently. So I decided to see what Linux did. When I booted into Linux I tried to access the DVD and it ran just fine. I tried everything to get the drives to fail. As always it looks like windows just sucks.

I'm going to try a fresh install of windows and install drivers one by one to see if I can find the culprit.

TheForce · 06-12-2007, 09:47 PM

Looks like it was my video card that was causing the problems. Why it was not showing up in Linux I have no clue. I tried another old pci card that did not have a built in fan and it seemed to work just fine. I put the nvidia card back in with the fan disabled and it was a lot more stable but it still locked up. My guess is that maybe the video card was drawing too much power from the pci bus and causing some issues.

So now I'm just going to run my PC without an extra video card. I wont be able to do the native 800x480 resolution like I wanted to but I guess this will help out on keeping the PC a little cooler. Now I need to find something to put in that extra pci slot. <_<

TheForce · 06-15-2007, 08:06 PM

I'm giving up on Linux for now. The only real reason I was wanting Linux on my car PC is to run kismet when I want to do a little wardriving.

I could get kismet working on my laptop with RedHat 9. I may install RH9 on my car PC just to get kismet working. I really dont need the latest kernel or anything major. I'll just stick with Netstumbler on XP for now.

Since I'm giving up in Linux I've been more focused on my XP install. I have everything installed that I think I may need. If I miss anything I'll just have to install it later because right now I'm going to focus on getting the wiring for the car to hook up everything.

What I'm going to need to find out is how many USB extension cords to buy and what type. What kind of other cables to get and how many like RCA, 4 strand wire, some kind of wire for power and some cat5 for other stuff.

Also I would like to get voice activation to work with this PC but my current microphones are so crappy you have to hold you mouth up to them before the software will recognize what you say. So i'm looking for either a good wired mic possibly a powered mic or maybe a bluetooth mic that is small and hangs on the ear.

I also need to figure out what I'm going to do about the "power" button and reset button. I can currently have the PC to start when I start the car but I may throw in a kill switch so if I don't want the PC to boot I can have that option. I'm thinking about buying a tire reset button to use as my PC reset button. This is the button that is under the steering wheel. I thought that since there is an extra place for a switch down there I could add another tire reset switch in the empty hole. I would then use it as my PC reset switch since its just a momentary switch plus this would be an out of the way area so I don't accidentally bump it or a passenger does not bump it.

06-07-2007, 10:51 PM	#25
TheForce I Plug-In My Prius Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wheelersburg, Ohio Posts: 2,749 My Car: 2006 Prius Model: Package: #7 Thanks: 7 Thanked 171 Times in 125 Posts Friends: 22	Here is a quick update. I have the PC put together and its currently running on the bench with an ATX power supply acting as the virtual prius battery. Windows XP is up and running with all addons working. God I hate Linux I actually love linux but its such a PITA. I installed Fedora 7 and its by far the best linux distro out there. It recognized everything that was built onto the motherboard. The only other distro that I tried that did that was RedHat 9. Of course I havnt tried any others since RH9. I'm having problems finding some drivers for the GPS, USB wireless A/B/G adapter, and my nvidia video card. The nvidia driver shouldn't be that hard to find. I tried the one on nvidia's site but the current driver did not support my card. I think I may have to find an older version. Or I may try to see if I can force 800x480 resolution with the current generic drivers. I still want to try to get the nvidia drivers installed because it might speed things up a little with real drivers. I also have to make a linux boot CD so I can get rid of GRUB. I had to do a little modifications to the case and other parts to get everything to fit in that small area. Since I have two 120gb drive in raid 1 I had to make a little more room. The two stackable drive bay I bought was either nonstandard or the case was non standard or both. None of the holes lined up to mount the drive in the extra bay slot in the upper right hand side of the case. I had to drill an extra hole on the mounting plate of the case. No biggie. Then I realized that the video card had to be in the bottom PCI slot of the PCI riser card. This meant I had to either find a new location for the 2 hard drives or split them. I decided to split them. One will be in the regular IDE hard drive bay beside the power supply and the other left in the current spot. My video card that I bought was a little defective. The push down plastic clamp that keep the heat sink on was not fully depressed. It was blocked by a little bit of solder in the hole. Stupid me decides the best way to open the hole was to stick a small screwdriver in it and chisel it out a little. Some how a CAP popped off of the rear side of the GPU. I was like $#!! and it had to be one of those little surface mount ones to. I decided it could not get any worse and got out my soldering iron. I hate soldering SMD components. In fact I'm better at desoldering them than actually soldering them. I got out my very fine silver solder and went to work. about an hour later I had it secured to the board and I checked it with my multimeter. Looks like I got all 8 leads connected to the right place. So far I havnt seen any video problems. I also desoldered the crap that was in that hole. The heat sink is now secured to the board. HD0 is at the upper middle and HD1 is at the right under the video card. You can just barely see it. I put a strip of metal on the USB ports in PCI slot 2 to keep it from moving inward when inserting USB devices. This case does not have anything to hold down the PCI plates so I had to rig this thing up. __________________ 2006 Prius Barcelona Red Package #7. Picked up 2006/01/02 Converted to Plug-In on 2008/08/12 with Hymotion L5 *Hybridfest 2007 & 2008 Peoples Choice Award * *Hybridfest 2009 Peoples Choice Best of Show Award * For a list of my mods visit http://www.jaygroh.com

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Projeto de painel para VE - Veículos Elétricos \| Grupos do Google	This thread	Refback	04-01-2009 03:23 PM
Projeto de painel para VE - Veículos Elétricos \| Grupos do Google	This thread	Refback	02-19-2009 06:33 AM
Projeto de painel para VE - Veículos Elétricos \| Grupos do Google	This thread	Refback	02-18-2009 02:59 PM
ATLAS.SK -car pc	This thread	Refback	12-15-2008 04:58 AM
Jay Groh dot com	This thread	Refback	08-03-2008 04:28 PM

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05-30-2007, 08:04 PM	#21
TheForce I Plug-In My Prius Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wheelersburg, Ohio Posts: 2,749 My Car: 2006 Prius Model: Package: #7 Thanks: 7 Thanked 171 Times in 125 Posts Friends: 22	I purchased the parts for the PC today. I updated my first post with the parts information. I also bought some cables and other stuff. I don't really think I need to mention what they are.

05-30-2007, 08:11 PM	#22
Cheap! Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2006 Posts: 1,157 My Car: Model: Package: Thanks: 0 Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post Friends: 4	Let me know if you are going to do a mount in the back of your car like I did. I have an idea that involves a lot less cutting and loss of material from the back wall. It should keep your car quieter.

05-30-2007, 08:21 PM	#23
TheForce I Plug-In My Prius Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wheelersburg, Ohio Posts: 2,749 My Car: 2006 Prius Model: Package: #7 Thanks: 7 Thanked 171 Times in 125 Posts Friends: 22	I'm thinking about putting it in the lower cargo area but I'm accepting any ideas. The case I'm getting is larger than yours. So I'm a little tight on space. I do want it out of the way. I want to be able to use my trunk fully without problems.

06-12-2007, 01:53 PM	#26
TheForce I Plug-In My Prius Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wheelersburg, Ohio Posts: 2,749 My Car: 2006 Prius Model: Package: #7 Thanks: 7 Thanked 171 Times in 125 Posts Friends: 22	Another update. I'm currently getting my windows OS fully installed and working with a front end. I decided on RoadRunner with the DigitalFX 2.0 skin. So far everything works except for a little problem. When I try to use my DVD drive it seems to kill a hard drive. Every time the DVD drive tries to access the DVD the hard drive sounds like it powered off. Sounds like a CLICK and a spin down. I have also seen it do this when accessing my USB TV tuner only it fully locks the computer when it clicks. I can only think of 2 possibilities. One being that I'm using an ATX power supply to run the car PC while its out side the car and its not providing enough power to the PC. The second being that the hard drive may be bad. I can only hear one of the drives click so it may be that it is a bad drive. I hope not but since having two drives in a raid 1 I wont mind shipping one hard drive off to get it replace. I'm currently running Spinrite on the drives now just to make sure they are OK on the SMART end.

06-12-2007, 03:25 PM	#27
jamesl Junior Member Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 14 My Car: Model: Package: Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts Friends: 0	Very nice project..... Tell me do you plan on having Wireless network support?

06-12-2007, 09:47 PM	#29
TheForce I Plug-In My Prius Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wheelersburg, Ohio Posts: 2,749 My Car: 2006 Prius Model: Package: #7 Thanks: 7 Thanked 171 Times in 125 Posts Friends: 22	Looks like it was my video card that was causing the problems. Why it was not showing up in Linux I have no clue. I tried another old pci card that did not have a built in fan and it seemed to work just fine. I put the nvidia card back in with the fan disabled and it was a lot more stable but it still locked up. My guess is that maybe the video card was drawing too much power from the pci bus and causing some issues. So now I'm just going to run my PC without an extra video card. I wont be able to do the native 800x480 resolution like I wanted to but I guess this will help out on keeping the PC a little cooler. Now I need to find something to put in that extra pci slot. <_<

06-15-2007, 08:06 PM	#30
TheForce I Plug-In My Prius Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wheelersburg, Ohio Posts: 2,749 My Car: 2006 Prius Model: Package: #7 Thanks: 7 Thanked 171 Times in 125 Posts Friends: 22	I'm giving up on Linux for now. The only real reason I was wanting Linux on my car PC is to run kismet when I want to do a little wardriving. I could get kismet working on my laptop with RedHat 9. I may install RH9 on my car PC just to get kismet working. I really dont need the latest kernel or anything major. I'll just stick with Netstumbler on XP for now. Since I'm giving up in Linux I've been more focused on my XP install. I have everything installed that I think I may need. If I miss anything I'll just have to install it later because right now I'm going to focus on getting the wiring for the car to hook up everything. What I'm going to need to find out is how many USB extension cords to buy and what type. What kind of other cables to get and how many like RCA, 4 strand wire, some kind of wire for power and some cat5 for other stuff. Also I would like to get voice activation to work with this PC but my current microphones are so crappy you have to hold you mouth up to them before the software will recognize what you say. So i'm looking for either a good wired mic possibly a powered mic or maybe a bluetooth mic that is small and hangs on the ear. I also need to figure out what I'm going to do about the "power" button and reset button. I can currently have the PC to start when I start the car but I may throw in a kill switch so if I don't want the PC to boot I can have that option. I'm thinking about buying a tire reset button to use as my PC reset button. This is the button that is under the steering wheel. I thought that since there is an extra place for a switch down there I could add another tire reset switch in the empty hole. I would then use it as my PC reset switch since its just a momentary switch plus this would be an out of the way area so I don't accidentally bump it or a passenger does not bump it.