Slashdot Mirror
Complete PC instead of a Car Stereo
An anonymous reader submitted linked to a PC that fits in your
car stereo slot. It's a bit spendy at $1k, but its got CD/DVD, PCMCIA, USB,
Keyboard, Mic, Headphones, VGA, more. And besides being
powered by your car, it also has built in GPS. Lots of interesting
hacking ideas here for people who prefer to spend more time in their
cars then me ;)
Unfortunately, if it becomes widespread, more jobs may require computer use and more jobs may force commuter time to be worktime.
I for one will miss my opportunity to sing at the top of my lungs while I sit there trying to drive on the freeway while fielding phone calls and writing voice-controlled spreadsheets.
Others, though, may like the notion of getting paid for their commuter time.
Will you be able to use these in New York State, which outlawed hand held cell use while driving? Not until voice control technology gets richer and broader.
Goat sex free since 2001
They should have used a slot-loaded optical drive instead of the tray. It would be less of a jump for people to grep if it was more like a regular car cd-player.
Although the Empeg (now known as Rio Car) isn't Intel-based, it runs on a decently powered StrongARM CPU, and includes a nice screen as well. Runs Linux, and I believe is somewhat hackable.
Since they've stopped production, they're selling off the last ones really cheap - $399 for 60GB version. If you want a nice, hackable in-car computer to hack around with you might want to snap one of these up before they're all gone.
You could try to do it yourself if you dare follow this link or in spanish It's simple a conversion from car 12v to the voltage needed by the mainboard. (no monitor yet).
Now the bozo in front of me is going to be tweaking perl scripts instead of getting his lazy ass through the next yellow light.
to the term "crashing your computer..."
"But officer, I was only trying to reboot linux..."
-RickTheWizKid
There's people out there who have to "fish" this site and come up with garbage when you write "then" instead of "than". IIRC, you were supposed to learn the difference in 2nd or 3rd grade in the US.
woof.
Spelling doesn't matter? So where do I get a compiler that can handle IF...THAN statements and won't bitch that some variable hasn't been declared simply because I misspelled it on second use? Sheesh!
I have a computer in my car.
No display, but it's got plenty of music. I got a cheap 300w Power Inverter for something like $50 from Wal Mart. Plugs into the cigarette lighter.
From there, I have a P166 in a tiny little case under the passenger seat plugged into the inverter. The computer has a network card and a Sound Blaster Awe64. Line Out from the sound card runs to a Ground Loop Isolator (to eliminate the interference buzz from the inverter, $14 at Radio Shack), and from there, connects to my car's factory radio via one of those CD-Player Cassette adapters.
The computer has no display, and is controlled via PS/2 keypad. Around 370 mp3-format songs are loaded on the Western Digital hard drive, which has proven remarkably hardy in all kinds of driving conditions. It also has a built-in NIC, so I can upload new songs.
Cost? About $200. (Computer was around $70, wires - $20, inverter - $50, keypad - $10, GLI - $15, Sound Blaster - $10, Cassette Adapter - $3.) Much cheaper than the above novelty, and much more flexible and expandable.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
It seems to me like Clarion's "Auto PC" was almost the perfect device of this type. I guess the price was too high for people though, so it got discontinued.
It gave you a pretty normal car stereo/CD player with MP3 capabilities, built-in GPS, and anything else you wanted to develop for its Windows CE environment.
I see them on eBay all the time - and wish I thought to buy one before I blew $350 or so on my new double-DIN head unit for my car. Oh well....
...and save your stereo slot.
My stereo slot is very very important to me since I like really really loud music. But I also wanted a computer in my car so that I can have mp3's piped through my stereo. I have the World's Smallest PC with it's audio output going into my car stereo. As a screen I am using a 5" LCD screen very sloppily mounted in the passenger side sun visor. With a happy hacker keyboard and a wireless trackball... I don't need to leave my car.
Auto dashboards shouldn't have something of that complexity. Too distracting. Pilots call this "head-down time", time spent looking at the controls instead of the window, and a big problem in modern cockpit design is reducing head-down time. But aircraft have autopilots, big planes have two people, and in cruise flight in uncongested airspace, near-term trouble from the outside is unlikely. None of this applies to automobiles.
Lots of interesting hacking ideas here for people who prefer to spend more time in their cars then me ;)
Uhh.... I spend a LOT more time in my car than I spend in you....
This post is brought to you by the letters T and A, and the number 69
This does seem pretty neat, if used for things like Police cars, ambulances, etc. For regular people though, I just see it as yet another way to cause an accident. Cell phones are bad enough...
These things are great with WLAN, to use the car e. g. as a "mobile storage" for MP3 or such things. Fill up your car's harddisk with music which you have ripped at home, drive to work, download them onto your workstation (or get them on-the-fly) and listen to them. Of course a Freenet-like P2P filesharing network on the motorway would be great, too, to enlargen your music filebase while driving across the country. As a more useful purpose, information about traffic and weather conditions could be gathered by the cars themselves and shared among each other.
1. A machine that interfaces with the on board computer so you can see what codes, translated into meaningful messages, are being sent to the car's computer.
2. With the above, remind you when to perform routine maintenance like oil change, tire rotation, coolant flush, transmission flush, usw. This would also give you a good idea if your mechanic is honest or not. (Don't give him root.)
3. Firewire
4. Voice control
5. HUD
6. There might be some benefit to incorporating the security alarm.
From what I know, all of these things are possible. But someone, maybe one of our own, need's to build it first.
I can't think of anything else right now.
Someone hates these cans.
They mention using navigation software and GPS. This pretty much leaves Linux out unless there is a good navigation package for Linux of which I am unaware (and I've looked long and hard, beleive me).
The closest I've been able to come is using older versions of Delorme's MapNGo under Wine, but that is still rather twitchy.
I've pestered Delorme to make a port, but they don't seem interested.
www.eFax.com are spammers
That's what we need... a Game Boy Advance ported to a steering wheel... display in center, buttons on wheel. Or, projected hologram-type screen which appears to float about 10 feet in front of the car.
Now that would be cool.....
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
This is good. Previously, the best commercial computer-in-car setup was the Q-PC.
Otherwise, many people have just hacked an old PC to work in their trunk or under the passenger's seat, see MP3Car's registry.
Hopefully my car will be on there soon. I'm going to try straping a wireless keyboard around my neck, and type with my right hand with a half Qwerty setup, with sound output only, for safety's sake. There's already software written for this setup-- visually impared people have to work with this type of setup every day.
removeable faceplates stop ZERO car thefts. that removeable faceplate doesnt slow them down or even deter them because replacement faceplates are very very easy to come by. the only safe solution id to undock the whole stereo... or better yet, add supplimental insurance and hope it keeps getting stolen.
I leave my car unlocked all the time and never remove the faceplate to my autopc. but then I dont park where my car can get ripped off, or broken into. nor do I live in a crappy neighborhood. It's choices...and I found the easiest is to keep the car unlocked so I dont have to pay for windows or doors and have my insurance company buy me a new stereo every X months.
removable face is NOT anti-theft. the only car stereo I have ever seen that is anti theft is Blaupunkt. if you remove the stereo fromthe car next power up it display's STOLEN STEREO, enter 6 digit pin. and you have 3 tries to enter the pin, after that the stereo is trash. and yet it still didnt stop them from getting stolen... Thieves are the stupidest people on the planet... otherwise they would actually have jobs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Specs (truncated)
128MB SDRAM; Upgradable to 256MB
~One 144pin DIMM slot for PC100/PC133 SDRAM
~10GB UDMA hard drive
~24X Max. CD-ROM drive ( swap for dvd / cd-rw )
~56k modem & 10/100 ethernet
~Intel 82810E built-in full motion video accelerator w/ 4MB shared video memory
~Supports 1280 x 1024 pixels resolution at 24bit color
~S-Video / RCA composite Out ports
~Speakers and Audio: Built-in 16-bit stereo (Sound Blaster / Adlib compatible)
~Built-in speaker
~microphone in / line out port
~IrDA
~Peripheral Connections: Two USB, one 9-pin serial port, one 25 pin parallel port (EPP / ECP) PS/2 mouse & keyboard ports
~Dimensions: 157mm x 146mm x 45mm (6.18" x 5.75" x 1.77") & approx. 950g (2 lbs)
* One Year Manufacturer Warranty
* No Operating System Included
http://developer.sharpsec.com/
Put a cradle and power supply in the aux slot of your car and then put your music(mp3's) on a CF card. There you have it. You could use the rs232 port for gps features too. If you want more disk space then use the IBM microdrive (1GB).
The iPaq would work too but the Zaurus has both CF and SD/MMC slots along with the IR and RS232 ports and it ships with Linux already installed.
Thanks for bring this topic up because you made me realize I already had the solution to getting MP3's into my Toyota Prius. This will be very cool and when I get the VGA CF card I can drive the touch screen built into the Prius too.
LoB.
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Anyone else notice the operating temperature of this thing is 0C-50C. I hope that no one buys this thing somewhere it freezes. You would think in a car stereo replacement they would design the thing to handle freeze...
Ian