Thread: NNS Mach-I Testing: COMPLETE

Well, for those of you who remember, a couple of months ago, I posted about an in dash player I was working on that only took up a single din. I completed the testing and here are the results.

Good: Starts up within 30 seconds. Holds 5000+ songs. GPS works great. Uses the standard after market connector for connecting with your car's speakers.

Sound Output: Great quality sound output, BUT it only puts out about 10 watts at the most. Would require the use of an external amplifier for the main speakers if more wattage was needed! Not very good for people who like their music loud.

Face Plate: Its an all metal face plate painted black. (Or a color of the buyers choice.) Its not fancy. Of course it has the DVD-ROM drive there, but it is not slot loading! It has 14 buttons with 7 being reserved for main functions. The other 7 have preassigned defaults but can be changed via the included software. It has a 1 line x 16 character LCD with LED Backlighting and 2 USB ports for hooking up USB keyboards/mouses. It also houses a connection port that can have our special com/parralel/mointor connectors hook into it. (Note: It is not recommend to use USB hubs due to the fact that draw too much power from the motherboard and the car battery which might cause failure and/or fire.)

Bad: All computers need some sort of cooling! I tested this deck in Dark Blue Jeep Cherokee. This thing becomes an oven when sitting around in the sun. (It repeatedly melts the glue off the rear view mirror causing it to fall off.) Since this deck is in a rather enclosed area in the dash and not many places to breath, I added in air slots in the one corner of the face of the player with a mini fan to help cool it. It doesn't need much cooling since its only a 233mhz processor. I had it lock up a few times due to heat but I am coming up with a better cooling system. We should have the heat issue pounded out within a week.

With all this said and done, I hope to have the units ready in VERY limited quanity by Christmas or late January. When the final prototype is finished and I make a display model I will take pre-orders. Pictures will be posted asap after the display model is finished. I will also sell plans to make this player for those of you who don't wish to wait around with pre-orders.

--Ashlawn Kemling(Alex Smith)
NoName Studios