Hello! and Thanks!

Hey guys, got my new Acer Aspire One today, 120gb, 512mb ram...

And about 5 mins ago I put it back together again, now with 1.5gb of RAM, and a new port:





Obviously that button will end up being on a much longer cable, and my AAO will be able to be an amazing CarPC, and still be portable as a normal machine! I just hope my soldering holds out.... those power switch feet were bloody tiny!

 

Very nice.

So how is this Carputer going to work?

GPS? MP3 Player? Video?

 

Hard disk in a car? Good luck with that. Hope your car is built for comfort, not for speed.

 

Have you never heard of a carPC? laptop hard drives are pretty robust.... otherwise they wouldnt be portable would they

It'll be wired up to the speakers, and is for music, dvds, GPS, anything really. Will be attached to a touch screen on the dash, which will be the control point.

 

Do you have a link to the TS and the software interface (Main screen of CarPC) you plan on using.

 

http://www.avforums.com/forums/car-ente ... stall.html

check that link for the basic idea, ive made some alterations of my own (such as the remote on-switch), and mine is mounted in a different place. But basically thats the idea.

Havent started installing front-end software yet, have been installing XP and things first. WIll be ordering my touch screen this week. But RoadRunner (the one that guy is using) is the recommended one I know of so far. Except I think its called RideRunner now... its based on the MediaCar software.

Edit: The link to the touchscreen is on page 2 of that. LinITX screens. I havent decided which one to get yet. but probably get the same one that guy used, as its good quality. Might suffer from some screen glare, but I'd prefer that to paying out another £100 for a transflective screen! We dont get that much sun anyway

 

Portability does not necessarily equate to robustness. A fresh hens egg is extremely portable but hardly robust when it comes to impact protection. Laptop drives can be fairly robust when using shock-proof mounts or a built in G-sensor. The drives in the AA1 though have neither of these safeguards.

Sounds like an interesting little project though, thanks for sharing!

 

I have a 500gb Seagate with a rating of 400g's

Specifications

Drive Type: Laptop


Capacity (GB): 500


Interface: SATA 3.0Gb/s


Interface Type: SATA


Spindle Speed (RPM): 5400


Buffer Memory: 8MB


Average Latency (msec): 5.5


Data Transfer Rate on Serial ATA: up to 300 MB/sec


Form Factor: 2.5"


Bytes Per Sector: 512


Temperature, Operating (°C): 5 to 55


Temperature, Nonoperating (°C): -40 to 65


Shock, Operating: 2 msec (Gs): 400


Shock, Nonoperating: 2 msec (Gs): 1000


Dimensions: 0.37" x 2.75" x 3.94"

 

Well depending on how he mounts it and the padding around it, the car use should be fine. I sure wouldn't try it in my Jeep Wrangler though LOL. Seems like a lot of works versus and Ipod or Iphone and a $100.00 GPS unit. I know my iphone's GPS works really well plus it plugs into my stereo for mp3's and movie sound through the Jeep speakers.

 

Nice. Would you mind dropping your AA1 on the floor a few times, say whilst defragmenting the hard disk, and let us know what a surface scan reports afterwards?

 

Well, im not going to be dropping the AAO on the floor... and I dont know about you guys, but I tend to drive my car on roads...not on rally car circuits!

And whats that about eggs? I see the point you were trying to make... but laptops arent anything like eggs. They certainly arent that delicate!

What I meant by portable, is that Laptops are designed to be carried and used on coaches and trains on a daily basis, If they regularly broke due to vibration, then I suspect people would stop using them Ive certainly never had a problem with my Samsung R700 before, and ive shaken that thing about an awful lot while its running!
I just picked up my acer while it was doing windows updates, and shook it about hard as I could. Hard drive is still fine. And my soldering didnt break. So win-win

And yeh, I use an Ipod on my current headunit. But fiddling with ipod controls is too fiddly for car travel. And ipods dont have 160gb of space for music, they cant play multi-format videos (mine cant anyway, and a new one would cost more than i paid for the laptop ), cant be expanded with usb, cant be fully customised to my own specifications.... etc etc etc.

And a *good* gps unit is about £100 minimum... Im getting the equivalent of a £200 unit, for £50. And its 7" touch

To get everything that I will be getting out of this, you would need to buy a double-din stereo head unit, one of the high-spec kenwood ones or similar. Look up a Kenwood DNX8220. Thats basically what I'll end up with. True, mine will take more effort to fit, and will take up a little bit more space.... but I will have on-board memory, fully customisable interface, a removable touch screen, and a fully functioning notebook that can be removed and used as such.

Oh yeh, and the kenwood costs £900+.... and im doing mine for about £300. Even if the hard drive dies, ill just replace it... £50, an hours work, and im still saving over £500

I might replace it with an IPOD hard drive, they survive running in peoples pockets for hours on end. Much more robust than the AA0 eggs

 

Sure no problem, how do I run the surface scan?

 

Kind of stupid to debate this point as really to each their own and we all can learn from others. I guess I would state though my iphone was bought through At&t and it is 16gb with GPS, it plays all movies with codecs, and has over 500 songs, which may be small or many. I guess for all the driving I do I would never need more than maybe 20 songs on a trip. So, if you need that many songs, then you must live in your vehicle and i.e. would benefit from a setup as you mention. Most people would never need a set up like that I guess. Interesting concept though. I used to have an expedite business for my drivers a setup like this could have been handy as their loads were cross country and they lived in their vehicles most of the times.

 

You are in the UK, you know our roads are shite, at least they are in our area. They certainly won't get repaired any time soon now that Flash Gordon, Saviour of the Banks, has given all our tax revenue away. The factory CD transport in my car has proper engineered shock absorbing mounts but it still skips sometimes when I hit a pothole.

 

In Windows Explorer, in the "Properties" dialog for your "C:" drive select the "Tools" tab and click "Check Now". Then tick the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" option and click "Start". Now wait for a long time for the surface scan to finish.

Not sure what the equivalent method is on a Linux-based OS.

 

iPod drives have a very low duty cycle. They are powered up briefly whilst a large buffer in RAM is filled. The digital audio or video is then streamed from the RAM bufferand during this time the hard drive is powered down with the heads parked. When the buffer is nearly empty the hard disk is powered up again to fill the buffer. On an iPod video (5G) the hard disk will power up more often when playing video because the buffer is emptied more quickly. This is also one of the reasons why battery life when playing video on an iPod is much reduced compared to when playing music only. The low duty cycle should reduce the probability of a head crash whilst the drive is in use, but inevitably this still happens.

The hard drives in iPods are mounted in relatively large urethane foam shock absorbing frames. There are literally thousands of "refurbished" iPod drives for sale on ebay. These have obviously been salvaged from broken iPods, as evidenced by the fact that the vendors are often too lazy to clean off the glue that has been used to attach the urethane foam mounts. Having bought a few of these "refurbished" iPod drives to use as potential HD replacements for the SSD in A110 models I can tell you that the likelihood of receiving a drive that has a significant number of surface defects is quite high. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why these drives tend to have surface defects.

 

Well whatever, theres thousands of carPC's out there, many of them made using laptops, its not something I've made up in my crazy mind.

And 16gb iphones are £400. So for less money than that, I get 10x more space, and a 7" mountable screen.
Yes, I can get it for less if I take out a 2 year contract... but that means taking out a 2 year contract. And it still wouldnt be as good

 

Can't argue with that.

Do you know if there are any touch screens that fit neatly in a double-DIN opening in the dashboard? This crazy mind likes the idea of using one as the tuning/instrumentation interface for a DIY engine-management system.

In fact, I should be able to pick up one of the original 7" EEE PCs dirt cheap on ebay. A 7" touch screen overlay is £20 shipped from HK. All I need to do is repackage the mobo and screen behind a double DIN display bezel and find a 12v - 18v DC-DC converter.

 

Those ones on the LinITX site range from 7" touch screens. They might do smaller, im not sure.
Double din touch screens are usually something like 6.5" or something... So if your going to go as far as making an engine managment system, then you should be confident enough to cut away a small amount of trim, and fit in the 7" screen

It might well be that the 7" will slot into your current space with minimal fuss, it depends on how your dash is set up. I know people that have taken the Acer 8" screen, converted to touch screen, and fabricated it into their dashboards, with the rest of the laptop mounted behind the dash. But thats a lot more dashboard fabrication than I feel comfortable with doing on my Prelude lol.

 

How are you going to power your AA1 in the car? The DC input is ~19.5V, I believe.