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Inexpensive Dashboard PC
Kristian - Dreamless writes "Wanting to war drive with style? The other day I surfed the web to find a free dash pc solution to my car since the commercial ones cost around 2000-2500$ here in Denmark. I found DashPC.com and I must say this looks promising a very nice GUI and the features seems to be endless: Navigation with War driving, Multimedia and so on. Requirements? Low cost pc and a dash LCD display."
Slashdot tends to link car-pc stuff as if it's new and different from time to time, and they always link to some fringe stuff like one particular piece of software or one person's particular (usually fairly hackish) installation. They have actually linked to the dashpc project before -- when the interface was built in perl/tk and barely worked! (Actually it's still pretty hard to install and make work -- I'd say it's at least as hard to install as MythTV) Anyway, the reality is that there are hundreds or even thousands of computer projects driving around out there, and there are many possibilities for what one can do on any type of budget from an old 486 embedded board with a LCD display that plays MP3's to a full-on LAN of fast pc's for backseat passengers to play games.
The best resource I found when I started looking into car-pc stuff were the message boards at MP3Car.com. They have sections for hardware, software, cabling, audio, gps, networking, OBD-II, etc. There are thousands of users on there, and everyone is very helpful. The archives contain a lot of good information that became invaluable to me when I was building my own car-pc project. It is currently going through a new overhaul where I am fixing some problems with the original design and functionality and adding some new stuff like OBD-II and reversing camera as well.