Thinking about car PC

[jameson_uk]

Right I am thinking about a car PC but I am not very good at cars...
Building PCs is fine but messing around with a car's ignition fills me with fear :eek:

I am guessing the easiest setup would be a single DIN unit with an amp and touchscreen. I guess this is just a case of plugging in the wires as you would a standard radio/cd unit and then pluggin in VGA / USB cables for the PC.

That would leave me with the pc (have a mini-itx maching lying around) and needing to plug that into the car ignition. I know you have to get a regulating PSU but how hard is it to do the wiring so that the machine turns on / off with the ignition ?

[Josho]

Hey new here, first post!

It's pretty easy. What car is it? If you can find a 12v comming off the ignition switch, your set. For the ground, just bolt a cable to any metal on the body or engine of the car.

You can just use the old radio adapter though!

[jameson_uk]

Hey new here, first post!Hi :D

It's pretty easy. What car is it? If you can find a 12v comming off the ignition switch, your set. For the ground, just bolt a cable to any metal on the body or engine of the car.
It is most likely to be a new Fiesta (need to buy the car this week)

Must be more to it than just plugging the PC into the ignition circuit ?

[Fireblade]

DaveMark is the 'leading light' on the forums for CarPC installations/mod's.
Send him a PM - to draw his attention to this thread?

Alternatively... send Graeme and the gang a quick email?
I'm sure they'd be quite happy to offer any advice you might need regarding installation/equipment required ;)

[Rchiileea]

Yep Dave is da bomb when it comes to this, I will be posting up his latest creation this week

[Stocky]

My brother fitted a PC in his 306. He put the mobo under the centre console and amplifier + PSU in the dash. The touchscreen monitor was then fitted in front of these. It took himm ages and was much more work than he intially thought - although there are easier ways of doing it by using slide out screens from a DIN.

I've also seen some of Dave's work years ago in a thread. It'll probably come up if you do a deep search? :)

[DaveMark]

DaveMark is the 'leading light' on the forums for CarPC installations/mod's.
Send him a PM - to draw his attention to this thread?


hey people nice to get recognized as the car PC man lol :)

Right I am thinking about a car PC but I am not very good at cars...
Building PCs is fine but messing around with a car's ignition fills me with fear :eek:

I am guessing the easiest setup would be a single DIN unit with an amp and touchscreen. I guess this is just a case of plugging in the wires as you would a standard radio/cd unit and then pluggin in VGA / USB cables for the PC.

That would leave me with the pc (have a mini-itx maching lying around) and needing to plug that into the car ignition. I know you have to get a regulating PSU but how hard is it to do the wiring so that the machine turns on / off with the ignition ?

ok as for this question , the igntion fear is not as bad as you may think all it is is one wire behind the dash usualy red or marked with ing just spilceing into this usualy gets the ignition line you need, as for the touch screen you can get single dins with built in amps that you wire into your original headunit loom how ever i would allways recomend seperate amp and monitor. then like you say vga and usb is just like a normal pc

as for the PC i recommend the M2 dc-dc psu , i think kustom sells it i will go and have a look in a min , as for the wiring like i said above to get it to boot with the ignition is just 3 wires .. postive,ground,ignition wire , positive goes to battery , ground goes to any grounding point in the car , and the ignition gets spliced into the wire from main loom

hope this helps

Dave