My apologies for not continuing on the original thread for the third time, but I couldn't find it easily enough and I'm exhausted, and want to go to sleep.

So if Justin doesn't mind, I'll be lazy and start a new thread.

If you remember where we left off... I made a homemade fiberglass dash and installed it into my F350 crewcab, like so:



Then, after being tired of driving with the factory cluster on my lap and staring at vast holes, I finally got around to hacking up yet another thunderbird cluster, as well as a chrysler "information center" which I shoved a ton of LED's in, as well as two pushbuttons for controlling the PC should my automatic PC controller wig out or something. Anyway, this is how the cluster turned out:


So far so good, right? Except I've had this absolutely huge hole where the truck PC is to be mounted... except I never got around to finishing that.

I did today.

here is the homemade steel cage I made, with the 3m 13" touchscreen installed.


Here is the back, with the p4 motherboard, 2 gigs of ram, and a 200gig IDE drive installed:



And while those pictures are "neat" you all want to see the thing working, right?


Now, driving with a mouse is impossible. Enter touchscreen.
http://frederic.midimonkey.com/f350/IM001554.AVI (1.23mb)

Now to reinstall the GPS software, finish soldering up the PC controller, and maybe tomorrow I can slap this puppy into the dash

 

There is really no way to express the awe to your projects, so I wrote a haiku:

All hail frederic,
Master of do-it-yourself.
Difficult made easy.

Does that successfully relate my appreciation of you sharing your projects?

 

Not making FTE your homepage I see....

Very cool. Can't wait to see pics of the finished product. good luck.

(for those of you who didn't watch the video...he brought google.com up on the screen)

 

Yeah, I host my own stuff on a server in the basement. Since it's local to me, editing HTML and pictures is easier - I just map a drive and have at it. No ftp clients, no file space limitations, no pop ups, no advertisements, and no "rebranding" of my pictures (fte for example likes to put "www.ford-trucks.com" on your pictures when you put them in the gallery). That's not a slam on FTE BTW... just some things that annoy me for some reason, which I can avoid by hosting my own websites.

Plus, maintaining all your stuff in one place is convienent - and at gigE speeds (since it's local) there is absolutely no waiting ever

And thanks for the compliment!

 

Frederic, your car computer is better than my desktop computer.

 

Yeah, well, it has a lot to do.

Movies for passengers, on-the-fly maps for me, radio, TV, act as a wireless router when 8.11B/G is available, sprint PCS internet when not, eventually climate control and suspension control, blah blah blah. I just had to buy the motherboard, everything else was "spares" for my webserver. Recycle

 

Which release of Fedora Core are you running? I've had some issues with 4.

 

Fedora Core 2, because the touchscreen drivers stop at FC3, and I couldn't get FC3 to support ACPI correctly. Hit the power button, and the machine shuts down, but doesn't physically power off. Works great in FC4, but then the touchscreen driver doesn't work.

So, I went backwards to FC2.

Now I'm trying to get the linksys wireless card to work (WMP54G) and that's been a struggle... seems that driver is only available as source, rather than as a already compiled version. Oh well.

Always an adventure

 

Fredric, look into a program called NDISWRAPPER, it will let you use the WINDOWS driver. I know it works, I've used it on Fedora Core 2. It refused to work with 4 so I went back to 3.

 

Very awesome. I love seeing a nerd show his true colors then ontop of that he shows hes mechanically inclinded. Very awesome man. On having your own website I know the feeling. Its just nice to host your own cause you have everyhting you need right then and there. Im at school or work most of the time and I have my VPN setup so I can access everything I need to.

 

Yeah, I tried that route and struggled with it. I do have the RT2500 driver in source, so I can compile it I guess once I load all the compiling tools and kernal source which I didn't initially. Was trying to be frugal with space. Guess I can purge that stuff afterwards...

And thanks S8!

 

Ive done some management stuff with a computer before it was for a converior but same idea used it for settings and such. I ended up writting a program for it and just ran it. I wrote it in Unix. That might be an option.

 

wow frederic, thats commin along really good, keep up the good work.

 

Thanks!

It will be nicer when I get the wireless card to "hunt' upon bootup

 

Frederic,

I'm still patting myself on the back for eliminating my dana 60 king pin springs this week....I'll just pretend I didn't see this thread so that I can still feel like I'm breaking new ground

btw- touch screen makes sense, but I half expected a roller-mouse setup on your gear shift

You said suspension control. Air bags?