BTW a P4 prescott 2.8ghz is a 100watt cpu that doesnt leave much spare from your 150watt psu for your other stuff, dvd =25 watt hdd =25, then you got a couple of USB's mobo, fans, keyboard and mouse, touchscreen, FDD, memory
It soon mounts up...
Er, Ronny you've totally missed the point of my post !
I know full well what sort of powers a modern PC requires - I'm sat at work right now, being an I.T. Technician.
I wasn't talking about things that were "on the market" !
Take a look at
I suggest you take a look inside a modern Shuttle system.
If you really want a car PC, then you should be using a Laptop as the basis. Modern laptops will run from a single ~20v feed - the necessary gubbins to split this down is mounted on the motherboard. Pull it all out of it's case. Transform the car's ~14v upto ~20v, and squirt it into the laptop - same place you'd squirt the ~20v that comes from it's mains adaptor.
Laptops with smashed screens can be had for pennies these days.
Your alternator is *MORE* than capable - hell, mine needs to raise 300w just for my headlights (100w + 100w + 55w + 55w) !
Read my other post !
You obviously havnt been to
Ive had a car pc for like 15 months now m8 lol,
Ronny
Oh no, laptops make additions, upgrades, and mods like remote and auto power ons difficult, but the battery does a good impression of a UPS.
What you want is and Opus 150Watt, an Epia M10000-12000 motherboard, a laptop Hdd (80 gig if you can stretch) and a slot load laptop DVDrom drive, plus a USB FM or DAB tuner (not the Psion wavefinder they are crap). Add a small 4 channel or 5 channel amp, and you can ditch the headunit all together and run it from the 7" touchscreen that you will doubt mould into the dash, plus the old IR steering wheel radio control and an IRMan or IRA.
All low powered kit, compact, handles power surges and dips, and can auto shutdown when you switch off using a UPS signal control and a setable timer, and a few hundred plus fitting time should see it all installed fine.
How long have you been an IT technician? Not long if you think that only a loon would buy Intel.
Shuttles are crap. One of my competitiors thought they'd be a good bet for a compact system for a 24/7 application, not too intensive but the quality of PSU components left a lot to be desired and out of the 24 machines on that site I've replaced all 24 due to failure.
Laptops are a good basis but better to go with a small form factor industrial PC - there are plenty of ITX, 3.5" and 5.25" form factor boards available which will run happily on single ended 5V only supplies, all you need then is a simple hi-watt 5V supply - processors available include celeron, P-M, duron, PIII and the specialist low power ones (nehemiah, crusoe etc.)
The laptop I'm using just now manages to survive on a 40w supply, and that's charging a battery and powering a 1.1GHz P-M, 512 meg RAM and a screen....
Yep, as an alternative to ITX, Wafers, SBC, and PC104+ systems do make a lot of sense, especially the stackable formfactors that these days offer all the normal desktop functions such as sound/ (vga/tvout)/USB/Firewire/Ir etc. Excellent for a custom mounting in a case resembling a CD changer, and a single voltage in makes the system so much easier to sort, all you need is a decent regulated supply.
Actually, I have :)
Yes, I know !
No they don't - you can connect any widgets you like to a laptop's USB/PCMCIA ports - and they usually come with the free bonus of InfraRed onboard. Power-on switch is a simple push-to-make, so it'd be trivial to make it power on automagically You can add extra memory and a bigger Hard Drive, just the same as a desktop. Granted, it's non-trivial to upgrade the CPU of a laptop, but that doesn't really matter. They're small and light, and you don't need any bulky PCI/AGP cards, cos everything ever is onboard.
On top of all that, you have no power issues - Laptops will run from a single ~20v feed.
Two problems.
You'd be much better off with something like a
For what? It has video acceleration for DVDs and DivX's so they don't skip/drop frames/lag behind the audio, I can simultaneously run an MP3 player and a copy of Mappoint (with AGPS) giving audio directions without problems using XP. It would work better with a custom XPe build with the apps installed as packages but I haven't gotten round to building one yet.
Can't think of anything more demanding I would want to do with a CarPC whilst driving. Integration with the car systems (aircon/monitoring systems/temps etc) might be nice, but an Epia Nehemiah could handle that easily. I don't plan to use it to control the first mars landing, or plan a tactical nuclear war scenario, so it works fine.
Underpowered means it doesn't do the job intended, not that it doesn't have the biggest number engraved on the chip.
My Web/Mail/DB/firewall/NAT server at home on the end of my ADSL line is a Pentium Pro 200, with a fast SCSI HDD, and less then 200meg ram running win2k, apache, Mysql + a Firewall and a Nat routing package and it works fine with the most users that I've had being 6 connected at the same time. by rights, a PPro200 is an antique and should be bruned and smashed with little hammers, but it does the job I need, it is passively cooled, has an expansion for a second CPU, and I plan to stick in another 256meg of the ECC ram it needs to lesson the disc activety (I sorted it's current specs 4 years ago). It runs 24/7 for about 6 months at a time, except when windows update requires to have a reboot.
my Workstation at work is a Pentium 2 450 with about 300+meg of ram and about 16gig HDD space. I can re-encode videos should I need, and is fast enough to burn CD for work projects while I get on with other stuff at the same time. I would like a faster workstation, but the bosses (from a financial point of view) are right. It's good enough while it works. When it breaks you can have a new one.
The Opus 150W was originally developed for the US Police forces for incar PC systems running CPUs upto 2gig. I worked out the hardware for my old Duron 1.3 CarPC (before I went epia) needed 110watts power using a TV card, a full sized HDD, a Matrox G450 32m DDR card, a 5 channel sound card, a USB2 DVD and 3 other USB devices.
Lol - my PC was in a micro ATX case until a few months ago - 150w PSU driving a P4C 2.4GHz HT, 800 FSB, Intel 865GLC mobo, Radeon 9000 pro, DVD-R, DVD Combo, 2x 7200 rpm HD, firewire card, USB HD (bus powered...) bluetooth adaptor, PCI DSL card etc. Never glitched, only changed it 'cause I found an even smaller case to cram it all in to (minus one of the DVD drives)
Antec Aria anyone (tiny uATX case with a 300w 240v PSU)?
For a car PC which is going to be doing mainly MP3 / DVD / DivX I'd go with a celeron (good enough for the X box) based mini board, Extigy / Audigy2 NX (if surround wanted) or Soundblaster MP3+ (if stereo only), small touch LCD, TDK bluetooth USB (for keyboard / mouse / GPRS / Phone handsfree emulation), USB GPS receiver (for nav), WLAN (for sync in driveway and also for wardriving / surfing at motoway service stations).
Oddly enough, I'm just building one now using a Nehemiah, board arriving tomorrow with a DIN size case (handy!) and 80w PSU. When I do one for me though it's gonna be Pentium M based - low power but mega speed, and I still reckon on
Probably couldn't have done it worse than the Beagle team....
in news: snipped-for-privacy@karoo.co.uk, "Tim S Kemp" slurred :
Was talking to a chap who worked on the Beagle lander, and he said the current reckoning is that the altimeter doohicky went mental and told it to unfurl when it was about 200m off the ground. Or, as he put it, "Mars was a bit too far away". I hope beagle II does better, 'cos I'm working on that one, sort of.
*Note: 'doohicky' and 'mental' are recognised techical terms in the space science field.
I'd be interested to see any pics of the case and the build process if you take any.
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