Phil online

Yes, it’s time for a new carputer. Not that there’s anything wrong with the old one. It’s only 6 months old and it’s working beautifully. But it’s permanently attached to the minivan, my wife’s car.

This new carputer will be installed in my car, a 1992 Mazda Protege. And since I plan to replace this car soon-ish, I’ll make this carputer portable enough to move to my new car.

Requirements:

MP3 playback through stock head unit
Color GPS navigation
Touchscreen would be ideal

Challenges:

No aux adapter for head unit
Speakers are shot already

Plan:

CPU: My old Dell Inspiron 7000 Laptop which has been sitting idle for years
AUX interface: Cassette adapter or FM modulator (inline?)
Display: Xenarc or Lilliput 7″ touchscreen, hopefully used
GPS: USB GPS Mouse like on Carputer-I
Keyboard: small USB-keyboard (optional)
Power: 12VDC->120VAC power inverter

Bonus features:

DVD playback is built-in to this laptop, but I seldom have a passenger
Laptop is already paid for ($4200, 6 years ago)
Auto power-down is built-in to the laptop. Batteries have about 10 minutes per charge now. Perfect for shutdown needs.

Considerations:

I could use my Magellan Map 330 for the GPS antenna. But this isn’t convenient since it doesn’t power on automatically.
Laptop doesn’t auto-power-up. I’ll need a remote power button, hopefully automatically triggered.
Laptop hasn’t been great at handling “standby” mode, but I’d love to make that work.
Laptop is a 366MHz beast (slow), but it should meet my needs.
A newer/faster laptop could be used, and could be portable (removable).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Carputer, Design, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.