Phil online

1999 Honda Odyssey minivan

I need a place to install this carputer. I need a place for the motherboard, the hard drive, the power supply, the video, and so on. Here’s my story…

I love my Odyssey. It has a few quirks, too few drink holders, some automatic door oddities… but it’s a nice car. It drives like a car. It doesn’t feel much like a van at all. It includes several innovative (at the time) features. I plan to drive it into the ground.

So I may as well put a carputer in it now, and put it all the way in. I don’t plan on taking this carputer back out.

To install a carputer you need to have a place to put the motherboard (and other parts). There’s a CD holder bin below the center dashboard that we never use. It seemed to me like it would have enough room for a Mini-ITX motherboard, power supply, and so on. It turns out it did, but it was a tight fit.

I started by pulling the body moulding off the center dash console there. The layers came off surprisingly easily. Then I removed the CD holder bin itself and set about measuring it, estimating sizes, and eventually, cutting it to pieces with a saw.

I trimmed the entire bin away. I only left the hinge that holds the door on so the whole thing could be closed up nice.

Hard drive
At some point I decided to install the hard drive in the door shell. It has a nice scooped-out hollow area that looks like it’s the right size. It turns out that it is the right size, and I even have room left over for a cooling fan. (Hard drives, it turns out, generate lots of heat.)

I had some drive mounting brackets from some old cases I wasn’t using any more. I experimented a bit and chose one that I thought I could fashion some clips for. Then I JB Welded some metal retaining clips inside the scalloped hollow of the door. Once I slid the drive case onto the clips, all was great! Until one of the clips popped off. I have rotten luck with JB Weld on plastic. So I cleaned the clips of all the hardened epoxy and reglued them with Gorilla Glue. Fabulous stuff. It held great, and is still holding.

Motherboard

The motherboard in its case just barely fit inside the space I had left over. In fact, it didn’t fit once I put the body framework back in place. I had to take it back out and cut out the top span of the whole assembly. This made enough room for the case to fit in snugly.

The ATX connectors (video, USB, keyboard, audio, etc.) all face down into the floor of the van. Maybe this wasn’t a great idea since the weight of everything is hanging over the fragile connectors. But I think everything is held in tightly enough that it won’t actually press down on the cables. And anyway, if the cables were facing upwards, I don’t think I’d be able to get to them at all without removing the whole system. I can’t get to them now without a lot of work, but at least I can if something needs tweaking.

I originally decided for the wires to face down because the cigarette ligher (power socket) is down that way. I can snake cables around it, but I can’t snake the case around it. So the cables went that way.

The computer case

A computer needs a case, right? You have to protect the motherboard, you need to be able to mount extra parts like the video card, the hard drive, the USB extenders, fans, power supply and so on. In my case, I didn’t need most of that. I do need to protect the motherboard, and I do need to hold the video card in place. But I don’t need the hard drive there (I don’t have room for it near the mobo), and I also need the power supply to be located elsewhere.

I just needed a box slightly larger than the motherboard itself. Something about yay high, and yay wide. Something with a little room above for the PCI Video card.

I originally planned to fashion this case myself. I did some obligatory searches online for mini-itx cases. ($150! Are they serious?) But these cases didn’t fit my needs. They were designed for show, for user interaction, and to contain the power supply and hard disk and fans. I don’t have room for all that!

What I needed was something small — about the size of the box the motherboard came in. Yeah. That size. So I did it. I put the motherboard back in the box, cut holes the back for video, USB, etc., holes in the top for power, fan exhaust, IDE cables… and it worked. There’s even a nice divider for my VGA card to rest on. In fact, the box was so well suited to the task that I think they might have designed it with this in mind… Could they? Would they? No matter, it fit perfect for me.

Some notes:

• I tried to use the backplate but I couldn’t make it stay on well enough. In the end I decided I didn’t need it.
• The IDE cables snake out the opposite side of the box. I tried going out the top, but the edge worked better.
• I cut a hole for air intake on the other end of the box from the fan. I can’t tell if it works well enough yet.
• I cut a hole just big enough to snake the molex power cables through. Works great!
• I had to cut a long thin hole for the top of the memory SIMM to stick through. Otherwise it lifted the center of the divider about 1/8th of an inch. Now it just sticks thorough 1/16th. It’s still completely contained inside the main box, though. I only cut the divider.
• I cut another thin hole in the divider for the PCI Riser card to stick through. It is just the right height for the riser card I got.
• I did my initial backplane cutting with the board resting in the box. Later, I decided to put mobo standoffs on the board to help hold it in place. Suddenly my holes were all in the wrong place… sort of. I drilled holes in the bottom of the box for the standoff pegs to sink into. Problem solved? Not so fast. Now I needed to get the standoffs into the holes and the backplane into its holes at the same time. It sounds easy, but it took me about 45 minutes of experimenting and squeezing to get it all in. I hope I never have to take it out again.
• There is no shielding on this case. A computer should be contained in grounded metal to shield the outside world from the RFI coming from the internal components. So far this lack of shielding has not been a problem. I haven’t noticed any ingress or egress of signal.
  Update: I’ve had trouble operating the door locks from a distance. I think the remote signal may be getting lost in the RFI.

Power supply

I needed a place to locate the power supply. I have the Opus 150 watt power supply unit which is about 3×3x5 inches. I had always thought I would place it between the firewall and the ventilation ducts in that center console. But once I got down in there with the motherboard in place, I realized the ATX power cables weren’t very long. They were designed to live inside a case, after all.

I thought about getting a cable extender, but I’m a cheap bastard and I hate to waste time. So I moved over to the driver’s side of the console where I found lots of room. There’s a kick panel on that side that has to be removed, but it’s a simple matter of grabbing and pulling. It pops right off, especially when you already have the other body moulding removed.

There is plenty of room back there for the little box, and the wires all reach it just fine. I double checked to make sure I wasnt putting it in the way of any moving parts (there are some down here) and that it wouldn’t possibly fall into the floorboard where the driver’s feet are. Everything looked good. It was nice to see a plan like this come to fruition. I mean, it just worked.

Alternate locations

While I was down there working on the final pieces of the install, making the power supply fit, I noticed a lot of room under the driver’s seat. How come I never noticed that space before? That would have been a perfect place to put the carputer. I think. Well, it’s done now. If you’re thinking of ripping out your CD bin and engineering some space for your carputer under the drink holders (!!), you should probably check under the driver’s seat first.

I considered (briefly) locating the carputer in the back somewhere. But we really use all the space in the back of the van from time to time, so it didn’t make sense to put anything back there. I noticed that there is potentially enough room behind the rear quarter panels if you wanted to install a carputer back there. Removing the quarter panels was a pain in the butt, though, so you should proceed with caution. (I was working in the passenger-side panel which has the 2nd A/C unit in it. You may find other things in the driver-side panel.)

Video

I mounted the secondary video display on the ceiling. It’s a flip-down monitor designed to go into minivans. Routing cables for that was fun and exciting (as was cutting holes in the ceiling). There’s another post on that.

The primary display is an 8″ touchscreen LCD that I want to mount on the dash. There’s a nice blank slate area between the glove box and the air bag where it could go. But how to mount it there? I didn’t want to rip a hole in the dash or apply any glue. The monitor (Lilliput 8″) comes with a tiny little omni-directional stand with adhesive backing. I don’t trust the adhesive to hold the monitor all the time, though. I need something stronger.

Fortunately there’s a lot of aftermarket dash installs going on now with the rising popularity of the satellite radio units. I bought a mounting kit for a Sirius radio from Circuit City. I got this one because it has this one metal dash bracket that I need. It looks this this one. It’s designed to stick out between dash panels.

I had to trim the edges of one of my dash panels (they’re a tight fit!) but once I did, it fit perfectly. I straightened the metal piece and bent it again at an angle that would match my dash. Then I set out to drill holes in the monitor stand to attach it.

I was surprised how long my drill bit took to go through this dinky plastic stand. Then I noticed the metal shavings. It’s a strong, light metal. So strong and light that I thought it was plastic. It could be aluminum, but it’s very thin. What is that stuff? Titanium, maybe?

In the end, I’m glad it’s not plastic because I didn’t leave enough for strength. The metal base is very strong and very practical. It hovers just in front of the dash, it can be turned towards or away from the driver, and the touchscreen is very useable. I’ve heard it’s illegal to have this visible to the driver while the car is in motion. More research is necessary here, I guess. For now, I just try not to look when a movie is on…

DVD ROM drive

In the process of removing some dashboard components, I ruined the dash tray below the radio. I didn’t mean to, but I did need a place to put a DVD ROM drive eventually. So this will have to do. It’s a bit large for a DVD-ROM, so I need to make some trim to hold it all in place. I haven’t done any of that work yet, so I’ll just leave details on this for a later post.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 29th, 2004 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Carputer. 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.