Homebrew Car Entertainemnt System - The Hardware

In the first installment of HCES I forgot to mention that this blog is dedicated to all linux car pc enthusiasts.

The heart of all the hardware involved with this project. We did a lot of reading and research before diving into a small pond so to speak. I went through many hardware from retail to industrial components. Heres a list of all the components I ended up using:

SYSTEM
Instead of sticking with the usual x86 desktops I was able to find the VIA EPIA Mini-ITX boards which were available with onboard audio, video, usb, serial, lan, and firewire connections. They are the small factor motherboards and comes in a standard 17cm by 17cm in size (about the size of a mini mac). They come in various models and I chose the MII-12000 with a C7 1.2GHz processor. Although it supports max. of 1GHz Ram I only chipped in a 512MB stick since 1Ghz is overkill for what I am doing with it (it may also help speed up hibernation mode). The Mini-ITX was the smallest I could find at the time (2 years ago) I'll be travelling to Japan next week and hope to pick up a couple of the Pico-ITX boards in Akihabara - these are supposedly 75% smaller (a 1/3 of the size of Mini-ITX). To power this up from a car battery I use a 160 watt M2-ATX Power Supply Unit which connects straight to the battery. It survives engine cranks, and has programmable shutdown functions so I can safely hibernate the machine before it shuts down the power on ignition off.

STORAGE
The VIA EPIA MII-12000 Mini-ITX has the feature of booting from a solid state storage device such as a Compact Flash. I've come to realise that flash memory has a limit of writes it can perform, and it's not significantly any faster than a hard drive so I've decided to use a 2.5" laptop hard drive from Seagate. Having a slot driven DVD drive is on my wish list.

DISPLAY
A generic Lilliput LCD screen can be purchased from online stores such as EBay which has the touch screen USB interface to act as an input. I had other ideas like controlling it with a mobile phone or a customised ps2 controller but in the end a touch screen is perfect for this type of application. It comes with a standard VGA port, 1 video-in RCA, and a USB connection for the touch screen.




GPS
I encountered my first navigation tool when I purchased my Imate mobile phone, which had the PDA version of Destinator3 with all of the Australian maps on it. I've been able to port the maps from the PDA version onto a PC. By using the spare COM and PS2 port availble on the motherboard I connect my GPS receiver. On a good day I catch around 15 satellites and is pretty accurate.

CAMERA
Using a USB web cam is reasonable when you don't require much movement, not when your in a moving vehicle. These cheap web cams do not process movement very well and is very sensitive to lighting. The recording function is (shakes head). I've decided to ditch the web cams and get a camera which will feed directly to the RCA port on my monitor. If your wondering what the camera is for - it turns on when your car goes into reverse gear.



Now to install them....

Homebrew Car Entertainemnt System

The idea of dedicating a x86 computer in an automobile probably started brewing up back in '98 with a few friends from school. We had wacky ideas back then, some which has been adopted until now while others were not feasible. I went though a lot of testing from laptops with a bluetooth connection to a mobile phone to 12/24 volt power PSU used mostly in marines. The later turned out to be polluted with noise from the big ass fan. I've decided to start to complete this project using my 2000 Nissan Maxima TI.

This is the complete list of main hardware I have ended up using:

1x 7" Touch Screen LCD Display
1x Via EPIA MII12000 Mini-ITX Motherboard w/ 1.2 GHz C7 CPU
1x Kingston 512MB DDR400 Ram
1x M2-ATX 160w PSU
1x Vroom PC Case Enclosure
1x Seagate 120 GB 2.5" Hard Drive

I'm not going to go into detail every spec of the components (google is your friend right bout now) but with the size of 17cm x 17cm I couldn't look any further than the Mini-ITX boards. It has an onboard 5.1 audio, S3 video, com/usb/firewire bus, 10/100 lan, and ps/2 connections. The unique feature is the CF Card reader and the ability to boot from a solid state memory, but this does not mean I use it. I'm still convinced on using a 2.5" hard disk instead because of the limited writes on the CF cards.


I was able to fit the LCD screen in the dash with little modification to the double din brackets inside the dash. All the speaker wires were stripped from the harness and extended to the trunk where the amp is. RCA and 8 gauge cables were also extended to the trunk.

Other components include:

1x Haicom SiRF 20 Channel GPS Receiver.
1x 1.2mp Web Cam
1x 4 Port USB Hub
1x USB TV Tuner Stick

The GPS Receiver is used for the navigation (Destinator 3) and works quite well. The web cam has got to go - the recording function on every USB Web Cam I have tried are all poor quality. I will probably end up using a mini security camera with infrared. I'm still yet to test the TV tuner in a moving vehicle.

I'll be travelling to Japan for two weeks this month and hope to pick up a Pico-ITX when I visit Akihabara. The Pico is about the 1/3 of the size of a Mini and this would be a good replacement for Project Maximum Version 2.