Has anyone put a computer of some sort in there truck? I am looking into this so i can keep all my music on the hard drive. I would need a touch screen monitor i believe? Where is the best place to get a touch screen at a good price? I am good with fiberglass so mounting the parts into the truck won't be hard. Just looking for any advice on parts and what i need to do to make this work with everything. I will hook this up to an autoenginuity to monitor the engine in real time, store music and movies, and other tasks. Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

there are multiple things to think about first:

1. hard drives hate vibration, so road travel kills them. drives such as a flash drive or mp3 player last alot longer

2. screens hate cold / hot weather. my friend built an in car computer, the first winter the screen cracked. it was also very slow (the screen seemed gelled up) when it was cool out.

3 powering the device. most power invertors create noise. its very hard to filter it. it can be done but in the end its a pain

MY RECOMMENDATION

an mp3 player, cheaper and portible. now the new ipods can be controlled by most head units and you can hide the mp3 player from sight.

Matt

 

Or get an Eclipse AVN5495 which has a 30 gig hard drive that can store over 3,000 songs

 

the message im trying to send here is "hard-drive". they are bad. now if it is a "flash" drive then thats good. we want no moving parts

Matt

 

Fordboy - wrong. Hard drives are just fine, if they're appropriately built and hardened for their intended application. There are hundreds of thousands of Toughbooks, Gobooks, ML5/8/900s, MW5/8/900s, and other such computers installed in emergency vehicles around the world, and they work just fine. They all have hard drives.

My Toughbook has the drive packed in gel to minimize vibrations.

Any device purpose-built for vehicular applications (the Eclipse head, the Kenwood Music Keg, etc.) is going to be built to keep the drive happy. Do you really think the manufacturer wants to get 90% of the units sold back every few months under warranty for a new drive?

 

and in rebuttle, the toughbooks and other lines are also made of a flash style hard drive. i work for dell, i deal with these style computers every day. i service a line of laptops using the very same "hard-drive" that you speak of. they are made special

Matt

 

And you are completely and utterly wrong. Flash drives have several issues... slower access speed (although no rotational or positional latency), limited number of writes (new flash mem uses write-balancing technology to minimize this effect, but each memory cell can handle about 100K writes before dying), and extreme cost. 8GB cards currently street in the $400 range. How do you figure they're running 80-100GB of HDD in these units? Stack 10 cards together? Right.

Dell doesn't make a single computer that uses any sort of flash memory for it's mass storage device. They also don't build ANY computers which are ruggedized for use in the public safety field. I do consulting for several fire departments and other emergency services groups... I can assure you that you won't find Dell laptops in any of their vehicles.

Oh, by the way... you recommended an iPod to the original poster with an interface. Bad news: the iPod and iPod Mini are both hard-drive based, specifically a Toshiba-built 1.8" drive in the iPod (30 and 60GB) and a Hitachi-built 1" drive in the iPod Mini (2 and 4GB).

Know what you're talking about before spouting off.

 

Well Computers CAN be used and work great if installed properly. as for a location ot go, try MP3car.com. This site has a store that has all sorts of car computer parts. I built one using the ampie case ( looks just like an amp) with a 2 gig processor, 80 gig hardrive and 8 " touchscreen. I use mine more ofr Search and rescue work and a MCT system to talk to the county 911 center, but i also have a few songs on it. My touchscreen is mounted on my console with radios, but I know that site also has a forums with lots of pics on it.

Hope i helped a bit..btw mine has been in for over a year with no porblems and I do alot of off road with Search and Rescue.

JAS

 

What jsikora said. http://www.mp3car.com
If you're strictly interested in music playback, a Pentium I motherboard would be fast enough, and MPXplay http://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/ looks like just about the ideal player software to use. Rather than a touchscreen, you could get away with an alphanumeric LCD display connected to the parallel port, and maybe use a numeric pad for controls. Search eBay for "single board computer" and you'll find some industrial motherboards that are suitable.

Or check out the Omnifi DMP1 car hard drive player; those have been liquidated through various channels (notably Woot.com) for as low as $100 which is a pretty good deal for a turnkey 20 gig music player. The hard drive is upgradable, and a user community has come up with alternate software for it. There's some on eBay now.

About flash memory: there are patches for Windoze which make it more suitable for running from flash. And programs which modify the Windoze install to reduce the drive space required, like http://www.litepc.com/ Presumably similar stuff can be done with Linux and other OS.
There's been threads on MP3car.com about running from flash that contain good info.

 

dell does have computers with limited hard drives that are flash drives, they are called network pc's. not available to the general public... as for flash drives... and if flash drives only made it through 100 access's and writes they wouldnt be as popular as they are

MAtt

 

Careful Matt - read before inserting foot in mouth.

I said 100K writes. As in 100,000. Just fine for your average digital camera... not good for a page/swap file, etc. Windows is not very amenable to running without a page file.

Network PCs, hmm? What, like thin clients? If so, they may have some firmware in a Flash ROM (different than flash memory), but they boot from a server using PXE or similar. Oh, by the way, I'm a consultant... I have clients who purchase thousands of desktops and dozens of servers a year from Dell (although many are starting to move to IBM thanks to Dell's financials) and I'm not aware of any current Dell thin clients. They did build boxes like the e200 in the past, but that was years ago.

A proper hardware device, designed for mobile use, such as a Motorola ML or MW-series box, a Toughbook, etc., will be perfectly acceptable for in-car use.