Our company set out to make a station wagon look like a cross between the Back to the Future Delorean and the Ecto 1 from Ghostbuster. We took it down to bare metal, covered it with custom aluminum armor panels, and coated it with an awesome clear finish called Permalac. We then built a custom roof rack that will take a lot of gear and mounted a 24 db gain wifi antenna from Radiolabs. We wired the door to open when we enter a Nintendo cheat code into a controller in a box on the side (thanks Nokes project and Arduino). We replaced all the instruments with a Garmin GPS and a glcd lcd attached to another Arduino for the other instruments. I made a custom dash panel so now it has a glass cockpit like an airplane. The instruments and access control system use their own power supply with a small solar panel to charge it. We also have a battery bank in back for whatever else we want to run at a given time. If you want to run especially LCD's from a battery make sure to get a pure sine wave inverter as other posts have gone over. Make sure if you do attach anything to the main battery that you optoisolate it or use an inverter that has good optoisolation to mitigate the spike from the alternator. There is a picture and some video of it at the Northwest Computer Repair website. If you are actually interested in how we did any of this or picture let me know and I'll post something with more detail.
As far as advice for your van goes I always recommend brushed metal and riveted armor plating, as well as a full compliment of communications gear. It's not done until little kids assume it is actually an airplane.
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Our company set out to make a station wagon look like a cross between the Back to the Future Delorean and the Ecto 1 from Ghostbuster. We took it down to bare metal, covered it with custom aluminum armor panels, and coated it with an awesome clear finish called Permalac. We then built a custom roof rack that will take a lot of gear and mounted a 24 db gain wifi antenna from Radiolabs. We wired the door to open when we enter a Nintendo cheat code into a controller in a box on the side (thanks Nokes project and Arduino). We replaced all the instruments with a Garmin GPS and a glcd lcd attached to another Arduino for the other instruments. I made a custom dash panel so now it has a glass cockpit like an airplane. The instruments and access control system use their own power supply with a small solar panel to charge it. We also have a battery bank in back for whatever else we want to run at a given time. If you want to run especially LCD's from a battery make sure to get a pure sine wave inverter as other posts have gone over. Make sure if you do attach anything to the main battery that you optoisolate it or use an inverter that has good optoisolation to mitigate the spike from the alternator. There is a picture and some video of it at the Northwest Computer Repair website. If you are actually interested in how we did any of this or picture let me know and I'll post something with more detail. As far as advice for your van goes I always recommend brushed metal and riveted armor plating, as well as a full compliment of communications gear. It's not done until little kids assume it is actually an airplane.