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.