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New Car-Puter idea!

Guest F14CRAZY

By Guest F14CRAZY
in Buick Reatta

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Guest F14CRAZY

Guest F14CRAZY

Posted
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Hokay. You guys know about the Car-Puter. Now, consider this idea...

Locate the Electronic Control Center's CRT to where the tape deck usually is, or in this case, my Car-Puter's LCD, and put a 7'' touch screen panel for the Car-Puter where the ECC was. It would be considerably easier to watch my navigational info and control iTunes up there, but I don't think the ECC would be difficult to use down there.

Suggestions?

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DeeBee 1,000+ Points

DeeBee

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If you are going to put a computer into the car, give this a try:

http://www.mediaengine.org/

Saves lots of time. BTW, we put computers into cars all the time with our next project being a Fiero GT. I can tell you from lots of experience going back to the 90s that anything with a hard drive is a disaster waiting to happen, especially the 3.5" hard drives in desktop computers. You can shock mount them, water bubble them, it doesn't matter.

Keep your sanity and put a solid state device in there, something running Windows Mobile with embedded Bluetooth, WiFi and all that. There are some really nice devices out there and then you'll have something very reliable and workable.

These come with touchscreens and the entire units are self contained. We are now using Pencentras we bought off the Internet. With an indoor/outdoor readable display even bright sunlight doesn't faze them.

Shocks to hard drives are cummulative. Everytime you hit a bump, that HD is suffering. It could be the next bump or 100 bumps from now and it just trashes itself.

If you must use a PC, boot from CD and then store to solid state memory cards, they make them plenty big these days. Then you can use that regualr small form factor PC in the Reatta. It's really easy to do, booting from CD. Storage wise, you can throw in 5 SD/CF cards and have about 10-20 gigs of storage which is shock proof.

Do a search for autopc and you'll find vendors selling nice fanless PCs perfect for this use.

The fewer moving parts the better.

Touch screens are nice put not practical. Even the one in the Reatta is a pain since you have to reach to use it. Take a Glidepad and hook that up (wired USB not wireless) and put that thing right where you can reach it. Makes life a whole lot easier. That way you can ruggedize the LCD and make it very reliable. If you go touchscreen, passive resistive not active is the way to go. That way you can use a rubber tipped stylus or a finger.

Get an outdoor viewable type display. They cost a bit more but sure make a difference when the sunlight hits the display.

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Guest F14CRAZY

Guest F14CRAZY

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I am planning on getting one of those mini-ITX board based machines, or whatever they are these days, to replace the ipaq. I only went with that due to cost.

Yes, 3.5'' HDDs are eventually going to fail. A 2.5'' would be more suitable here, which I will eventually switch to with the mini-ITX machine. Right now though, I've got only a 10 gig in here. All I need, and a dime a dozen. Using Norton Ghost, I can get all my junk back rather quickly.

Already have a USB trackpad in the armrest <img src="http://forums.aaca.org/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

I'll admit though, a load of compact flash cards set up in a RAID 0 configuration would work pretty well.

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  • 5 months later...
Guest imported_Fox W.

Guest imported_Fox W.

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Just what kind of info are we keeping on our car's computer? If the drives die who cares..? Rebuild it for a few bucks and a little reinstall time. I presume the media data would be mostly sync'd to our workstation (well work for some of us) at home. Or just wait till solid state drives get a little cheaper. (I don't mean slow 'flash' memory.)

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Guest F14CRAZY

Guest F14CRAZY

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Not much data really, just music and my Streets and Trips map. I now have Norton Ghost to make hard drive images. If I have to replace it its quick and easy to restore everything

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Guest imported_Fox W.

Guest imported_Fox W.

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Funny, my old boss was just calling today from my old government job, asking how to do a disk to disk image copy with Ghost.. nice little app, very simple, small. Love that it lacks all the user-friendly junk (Atleast the Symantec Corp version, never used the "Norton" (home) line) Off topic now, hehe.

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Guest TommyH

Guest TommyH

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<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I'll admit though, a load of compact flash cards set up in a RAID 0 configuration would work pretty well. </div></div>

that was my idea, thank you very much. ive already got this carputer thing figured out, but i am a 16 y/o without a job, and i dont have any money. I hope to make this, or at least put in a screen this summer when i do some modding.

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Guest imported_Fox W.

Guest imported_Fox W.

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Let's not argue, the concept of flash memory in RAID has been discussed since 2002 on mp3car.com. It's also an idea that never became much because it's so slow, even with the best method which is a PCI card made just for striping compact flash cards without an IDE adapter, it's still slow. You'll also never have more space than maybe 8GB, which isn't enough for me between OS, MP3's, and navigational maps/software. A 8GB card is around $90, so you'll pay almost $400 to stripe 4 of them. I don't think this is the way to go. People have also not met with much success when trying to get standard IDE RAID controllers to work with flash cards. I don't mean to step on anyone's toes here, sorry. I'm certainly no expert on compact flash, but I am considered an expert on RAID because I'm an engineer at EMC. I wouldn't butt-in otherwise. (I typically only have interest in the video portion of this, dealing with the CRT/CRTC, the rest of it is not really concerning because adding a computer is a easy and well supported idea. What is not well supported are the proprietary aspects, such as interfacing with the serial bus on this car so that we can adapt a standard touch-screen LCD to send touch-commands to the Reatta's interface controller, AKA CRTC.)

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Guest CL_Reatta

Guest CL_Reatta

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Hmmm, I don't know enough about computer stuff to understand all that is being said, but couldn't one just take the hardrive and like put little rubber "shocks" around it to protect it from the bumps? or even do that to the whole CPU? or am I not understand whats going on enough?

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padgett 25,000+ Points

padgett

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Rotating media and cars just do not mix (optical drives can work). USB 2.0 manages pretty high data rates (480 Mb/s - 60MB/sec) and with a gig of RAM can do a lot. Is about as fast as FireWire. Also I recently put together an XP system for someone with a 4 GB drive that did what they wanted.

There do exist ruggedized hard drives but you would not want to pay the price.

Consider that modern navagation systems like the TomTom run on 32 MB of programs and use SD Cards for transport and they only manage 10 MB/sec or that the Carputer in the Reatta is a 2 Mhz 8 bit 68HC11 with 256K of ROM and about 128 bytes of RAM. It is just a different type of programming.

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Guest imported_Fox W.

Guest imported_Fox W.

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I agree that USB 2.0 flash drives are the way to go in this matter, it's even easy to do, so long as the motherboard you use supports booting from a USB device. The OS partition can only be 2GB since you have to use FAT16, but thats no big deal if you use that partition for nothing else.

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Guest MauiWowee

Guest MauiWowee

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<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Rotating media and cars just do not mix (optical drives can work). </div></div>

You all are way out ahead of my knowledge, but I do know that Harley riders who use hard drive type MP3 players experience a high failure rate. Card type MP3 players are fine. <img src="http://forums.aaca.org/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

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Guest imported_Fox W.

Guest imported_Fox W.

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Thats a decent choice, since it will work with any motherboard, but again very slow, (controller uses only PIO4) maximum transfer is only 16MB/sec. This is fine though if you always keep the system on/in stand-by, or if you don't mind it taking awhile to boot.

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Guest TommyH

Guest TommyH

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surrounding it in a shock mount sounds good, but when you think about it, the head(the part that read/writes data) hovers only micrometers above the platter(the disk, the part that holds the data) and little jolts really do hurt, but for a few months, it should work no problem. at least.

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