Ardesco

1 x Belkin Bluetooth USB Class 2 Adapter 123395 Warehouse Invoiced Track £8.10 £8.10

3 x Belkin Signature Series USB Extension Cable 3m 125024 Warehouse Pick in Progress Track £4.82 £14.46

2 x Crucial 1GB DDR2 533MHz/PC2-4200 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL4 Lifetime Warranty 63618 Warehouse Invoiced Track £12.09 £24.18

1 x EV Shiny Piano Black/Red Super Slim Micro ATX Mini Tower Case - With 200W PSU 20+4pin 1x SATA 134831 Warehouse Invoiced Track £22.97 £22.97

1 x Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180 2GHz Socket 775 800MHz FSB L2 1MB Cache Retail Box Processor 132064 Warehouse Invoiced Track £37.00 £37.00

1 x Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Music - VISTA Certified - OEM 143442 Warehouse Invoiced Track £43.82 £43.82

1 x ASRock ConRoe1333-DVI/H i945G Socket 775 onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard 129895 Warehouse Invoiced Track £34.28 £34.28

1 x Plexus VGA Monitor Extension Cable (Black) 3m 130551 Warehouse Invoiced Track £2.00 £2.00

1 x Hawking Hi-gain 2.4ghz Directional 7dbi - Compact Antenna En 106159 Warehouse Pick in Progress Track £26.92 £26.92

2 x Belkin Pro Series 2 Port USB Motherboard Cable 119520 Warehouse Pick in Progress Track £8.05 £16.10

1 x Trust Microphone High Sensitive 79215 Warehouse Invoiced Track £2.13 £2.13

Looking at that list, you don't seem to have a car PSU?

I was looking at one of these:

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12004

Will turn the power on and off when you turn the ignition on and off and also provides 250W to power everything in your machine.

Sorry I was slightly wrong it's a toslink connector i'm looking at (although most toslink cables come with a toslink -> mini-toslink adaptor.

It is a cable that looks like this:

It is optical digital output, that is currently supposed to provide the best digital signal to an amplifier, it's used in home hi-fi stuff a lot, but doesn't seem to have made it across to the car world too much yet.

Can you provide a bit more info on the CarPC?

I'm interested to know exactly which components you purchased, I'm still building my list, although I think I have the base spec to actually get a working PC in the car sorted.

The main sticking point that I have come across at the moment is finding a car amp that accepts a mini-toslink input.

Any suggestion greatfully accepted

My next door neighbour has one of these. She's a nurse....

Thanks...... I now have this horrible image of some bloke squeezed into an Ann Summer's Nurse outfit stuck in my head....

Check out the wing

You're only jealous coz yours isn't that big.

It's not the size of the wing that matters........

May have managed to source a transflective touchscreen with a Panasonic LCD panel in it from China for around the 200 USD mark (All sort of depends upon import taxes, etc).

Got to love the way they do business, the screen will cost you X amount. How much would you like the invoice made out for?

Or maybe he's Big Phil's +1

Is it a darker or lighter black?

Kuro is Japanese for the darkest shade of black there is. If it is lighter (as i suspect) it is the Holt Duplicolour.

Everybody is now looking at me funny because I burst into laughter in the middle of a quiet office....

I agree, but I'm not looking at a whole shuttle, just the motherboard ( I believe you can buy them for around the £100 mark). I have a plan forming that I will have to price up and see what I can do.

It may not be a realistic challenge (I'm fully aware that they are different beasts so it's not really a fair comparison) but a worthy one anyway

Only looking at buying the shuttle mobo, not the whole shuttle unit, currently trying to find a affordable 7" touchscreen monitor that is transflective.

I'm thinking that the challenge is to get it up and running for less than the cost of a double din head unit that does DVD/Radio/Sat Nav/etc.

A bit more hunting around at lunch time and some reading of the MP3Car.com website and It would appear you can get a 250W PSU that will power a shuttle:

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12004

http://eu.shuttle.com/en/desktopdefault ... ead-14213/

So my current thinking is a shuttle motherboard as that will provide 3 internal SATA ports, 2 external SATA ports, 4 USB ports, 1 firewire port, an Optical S/PDIF output, integrated VGA support and a wireless LAN option. It is also a small form factor and doesn't need a big cooling setup.

It also has the added advantage of using standard PC hardware enabling me to plug in any bits and bobs that I have lying around as well.

I think I'm sold

Something I need to do properly yes I have looked through it but not really searched the forums to answer all of my questions yet.

Out of interest Chris, what software do you run on yours apart from Centrafuse?

I actually thought that Lambo doors could be quite practical as you can always fully open the door in a tight parking space without dinking the motor next to you.

I was then of course held down and force fed my medication

That's a bit harsh. I have been through a couple of rovers and the only problems I had with them was the alternator going. My wife had a 416 for a while that was basically a Honda Civic with rover badges on it.

Nothing amazing but decent cheap motoring and they didn't have silly square shaped sump plugs like French cars, and were a lot more reliable

Erm, the steering wheel is on the wrong side....

Spotted in Bicester as I was driving home from the station today. I think the last three were BFO anyway.

Must have been around 18:00ish (give or take half an hour)

Hmm the Vista machines I have boot a lot faster than the XP ones, I will have to do some investigation. My OS of choice would be Linux, but I have a feeling it would take a couple of months to get touchscreen LCD drivers working properly on it, and I couldn't be bothered with that

Can't use a Mac as I'm not pretty enough...

I was thinking something like this would probably be ideal:

http://www.dabs4work.com/productview.as ... ationKey=0

or if you really want to throw the boat out:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... subcat=910

then for the CD/DVD drive I think you could probably get up to 8 of these into the compartment above the sub enclosure (need to go measure everything at some point though)

http://www.ballicom.co.uk/storage-devic ... 24167.html

or again you could really push the boat out and get one of these:

http://www.span.com/catalog/product_inf ... c49ac792e0

I just need to find a way around the power limitation, I'm sure there is one. If I do go for a mod like this I would rather uses a fairly standard sized ATX motherboard, just because I have a few lying around gathering dust and it would be much cheaper for me to do Just have to find a way to power that 700Watt PSU I have knocking about...

The biggest issue I can see is the power requirements using standard PC equipment, and the problem of either loosing power when your turn the ignition off, or having to remember to turn everything off so you don't drain your battery.

That and the obvious issue of initial boot time (don't really want to sit there waiting a couple of minutes for windows to load up....)

Maybe a solid state boot drive and then high capacity storage drives?

If you are building a incar PC you might want to look at some of the touchscreens from the likes of lilliput etc - not the quality of Alpine minotors but they are touchscreens making them much more user friendly.

 

I looked at doing this a while back and there are a few 800x480 screens that will fit perfectly into the Nav cubby home

 

Even if you go for the incar PC you can still get High quality out from it - get a half decent soundcard from the likes of MAudio and then store the music in a less lossy format such as flac etc and you will have some awesome sounds.

 

I agree 100% with H5 in terms of get decent equiptment and it will sound very loud. A decent amp and sub setup properly can blow people away at how loud they can be.

 

Agreed, there are cheaper options. Alpine do some touchscreens too, but are pricey. FLAC can help, then you're into storage, cooling and fan noise to deal with. Something I couldn't be doing with!

I don't see storage as a big issue really, all depends on what you are going to put in there. You can easily get a couple of TB worth of hard drive space for not too much money nowadays, that should hold a loads of music even if it isn't compressed.

Separate the hard drives from the rest of the system and one of the major causes of heat is gone, and buy a couple of slimline DVD players so you can slot in CD's or DVD's as and when required and it all sounds good.

I'm actually quite getting into the idea of this now

Just thought of something else, I'm sure I read somewhere that there are some sort of bolts on the front wheel that need to be taken off when spacers are put on (or something like this). Maybe they weren't taken off?

I'm sure somebody who has owned a Zed a bit longer than me will pipe up with a more detailed explanation of what I'm trying to say

My quick guess would be camber if you have had the tracking and the wheel balancing done. Of course I'm probably wrong.

Depending on how adventurous you are feeling you could shave 8mm off each side. Must admit I just looked at the width of the screen, not the height.

Maybe a 6.4" screen would be more realistic?