Here it is. Almost completed. After a few months in the making, I'm finally to the point where I can finally show it off:









Please excuse the pictures, the flash brings out every bit of dirt, even when you can't see it under normal light!
Also, I need to put in those door panels!


The specs:
Dell 500 MHZ pentium II
ALDL monitoring
MP3 playback (you can see winamp in the second pic)
7 inch lilliput touchscreen, very high resolution!

The computer is in a case inside the rear seat, out of sight out of mind.


What do you all think?

 

Nice! That's pretty sweet man.

 

I think it's pretty cool, and I think you had better write a tech article and that you had better have taken lots of pics!

 

hahah thanks!

It looks much better in person. The interior, not the car... the car looks like crap lol.

 

Excellent Toehead! I think I am still the only 'bird with carputer in progress. ;-) Pics to follow this week....and I did take a lot of pics.

 

Sweet, can't wait to read about/see it.

 

still working without a hiccup.

 

I've attached some pics of my progress so far. At least we all now know that a Lilliput 7" touchscreen LCD TFT VGA monitor does fit in the Firebird/Trans Am radio bezel. It took a little modification and I took enough pics to make a "how to", but that will come when I have more time. Enjoy for now.

 

both steups are pretty sweet..NightCruzer how much did that computer setup cost you....thats one of those things I have always wanted to put into my car.

 

I got the motherboard with cpu, the power supply, the hardrive and the monitor for $380 off of Ebay from someone who abandoned their project. In addition I had to buy a USB dvd drive which was like $87 new, a laptop to desktop (IDE) hardrive adapter $6, a laptop to desktop cdrom adapter $4, a computer case $83 and a new radio bezel so I wouldn't ruin the one in the car - $8. Total so far $568.

And one more pic of what I learned to do today.... This is all a learning process for me. This is a photo of my carputer during the BIOS Boot screen when the computer first gets power.

Toehead I apologize for seemingly hijacking your thread. I'll start a new one.

 

whats going to be a pretty sweet setup with you get t complete!

 

hey thats fine man! looks great! yours is a bit higher budget then mine... all i bought for mine was the screen... the rest I got from the scrap bin at work.

 

do you have any pictures of the computer? what did u use to hook the screen to the computer?

 

Not at the moment, the camaro is slumbering at home. I hollowed out the rear seat and built a plexi case... It is a laptop. The screen is hooked up via a vga extension cord and the touch is usb. Sound is run directly to my aplifier, which drives my speakers. The sound quality is amazing, although there is a huge difference between the low and high bitrate mp3's.

 

very cool...wonder if i should put this in the race car. hah.

 

thats awesome any more pics, cause I really like that setup the only problem is thats its so visible aren't you worried about someone stealing it

 

ya.... i usually throw a sweatshirt over it. So far so good though, and I park in some sketchy areas.

 

ya that would make me nervious....you should try and design a way to be able to detact it some how and hide it....
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do you have any close up shots of were the screen is mounted to the console?

 

oh, it pops right off... the problem is finding a place to hide it. It makes me nervous too, but the current method seems to work.

 

What did you use or what could you use to plug in and give the appropriate amount of power to teh computeer without ruining it?