Anyone here build a carputer? I thinking about doing a basic one.
My friend in Jersey owns a shop that does carputers… pretty cool… they have a case for the comp that you mount in your trunk that looks like an amp
I’m planning to build one for my 240 in the summer. Pretty easy, already got the Lilliput touch screen. mp3car.com FTW
guy on dsmtalk did a writeup on the carputer in his 2g i think
I saw on mp3car the have a basic set up for like $300. Would be nice to run something like Evoscan on.
I think with the basic setup you’ll still need hard drive and software. I’m looking to spend about $800 - $1000 on a decent system with software and GPS
Pretty cool “write-up” a guy did on another forum.
http://300zxclub.com/showthread.php?t=118941&highlight=carputer
I’ve got the motherboard from a small computer for mine. I just need to buy the touchscreen monitor
Waiting for Singh and Shady to add to this, but the basic concept isnt that hard… The hardest part would be the wiring… Especially to go into sleep mode when the ignition turns off, and to start back up when the ignition is on…
You can buy a powersupply that will do all of that. Goto the store on mp3car.com they have pretty much everything to build a system.
Not hard to do. If you can build a desktop you can build a carputer.
+1
I built a few. Look for MiniITX motherboards. VIA makes nice ones with built in processors and on board video. They are tiny, like 6.7" X 6.7" motherboards. I build plexi boards and mounted them to that and tucked them up inside the car somewhere.
They also make 12V powersupplys with all the molex and atx connectors and everything. They also have features that are like a turbo time for your PC… you turn the key off and it starts the windows shut down and keeps power to it until it shuts off.
Software is key. a little 7" screen running windows will be unreadable. My first car, well actually truckputer was a 14" LCD I glassed into the center of my ford ranger. so I didnt have that problem. but the normal smaller ones we did, we configured on a larger screen and wrote batch files to launch programs for MP3, GPS… in the correct resolution and size for the smaller 7" wide screens.
GL dude.
ohh yeah, hard drives… vibrations will KILL a hard drive. come up with a nice mounting system with will limit vibrations, or go baller and go solid state.
The best one we did was used a 6gb USB flash drive, and booted a linux OS off that. It ran GPS/NAV and car diagnostics and MP3 software. Then we mounted a female USB port in the dash, and you just inserted another #GB flash drive with the .mp3’s on it and ran them from that. No typical hard drive was used.
Solid State is the only way to go. 
I was going to build one for the Maxima…but I decided to just get a Pioneer AVIC-Z2 instead.