I am just curious if anyone has used their laptop as a component of their car. I am wondering If you can use it combined with sensors to monitor car settings, like tach, temp, pressure. Stuff like that. Anyone know of a program, or website, or even a way to hook my stereo up to a laptop. I'm talking like a 800 MHZ comp here not some PII.... anyone know anything about wiring up a "FUNCTIONING" laptop in their car?

Thanks

 

im interested here too if anyone can help or has done this beofer give us some info

 

Ummm, try here https://www.thirdgen.org/techbb2/for...?s=&forumid=16

 

Ya its called winadl or similar data collection tool just hook up to adl port

 

yeah, where can you get a hold of winadl?

 

One indiviidual on the board has wired his car up for a computer and gotten it to function. I believe that his user name was Serpent99. Here is a link to one of his posts regarding it.

https://www.thirdgen.org/techbb2/sho...hreadid=256402

 

that is what i have been working on in my car, one thing i have be looking at with every one setup is a power inverter. the thing is most computer's internel components run on a low voltage DC, but every one runs a power inverter to get AC then run it to the computer or laptop's AC in, whitch just converts it back to DC. there is BIG power loss there. if you run a series of resitor to drop the voltage to what each component needs it would be a much nicer and more battery effiecent install. it would just take more time and effort.

 

I do, but I have Mega Squirt. I also have the Mega View. It looks good at night.

 

mcwille, I hope you didn't start doing the wiring to feed power to the laptop just yet. I've done some electronics (mostly theory) and I agree with you that putting out 110 AC just to go back to 12 DC is not the brightest idea.

But here's the thing. If you want to create your own power supply, you use a power transistor, not resistors. Also you need to keep in mind the quality of the power. Laptops power supply has tolerances (i.e. 12V +/- 0.1% for example). If your car's circuitry doesn't produce something with in the spec, then you can't use it directly. Also you may need to worry about spikes and other unclean voltage that may enter your circuit. Usual power supply has protection and other things to make sure output DC is as clean as possible.

Again, I am no expert. Just giving you what I know. Maybe you are already aware of all this, but if not, then definitely ask around.

 

thank you for you input, i started toying with all this after taking a classes in DC fundumentals etc. and i was planing on setting up some sort of checks for the voltage and amps. right now most of what i have done is on a drawing board, and some brackets where things will mount like the DVD drive mounted in the center console and a touch pad mouse in the center console aswell. i am still a little was off from the sodder though i just fried the loptop with WORM so the mother board needs to be replaced. i hope to have it done by spring though