Wow, I didn't mean to start a flame war!The reason I cannot disclose our GPS supplier and model is because there are several others that read this board daily and I need to be careful as they are competitors of mine. We have spent lots of $$$ and time doing R&D work on this project and I need to be careful.
MP3_Truck - The bottom line is this: I respect and admire your wanting to build your own unit and have it "integrated" into your vehicle. However, a commercial product is very different than a custom install. I cannot hand someone a box of computer parts and tell them to have them installed at a local car audio shop. If this is the best way, then the person is better off using CNET Shopper or another site to buy the parts themselves.
A commercial unit needs a chassis. There are environmental, electrical, and other considerations that MUST be accounted for in a commercial product. Do you have any idea what kind of RF radiation an unshielded motherboard and power supply gives off? This would be unacceptable and would not pass FCC testing by any means.
I do not understand how packaging the computer and power supply in a compact enclosure with a custom paint job and graphics on it isn't integrated. And you can weld the M²PC to the body of your truck if you wanted to -- wireless networking takes care of having to remove the box for upgrades/digital media management.
I fully understand and have no prob with prebuilt and i understand if u cant give out suppliers thats ok. I just dont like when other ppl snap out because i recomend buiding your own its usually cheaper sometimes althought yer prebuilt is good compared to q-pc and other prebuilts your will blow them out of the water.
<p align="center"><a href="http://www.mobilemediacentral.com"><img border="0" src="http://www.mobilemediacentral.com/images/logos/mmclogo.jpg" width="171" height="151"></a></p>
I'm very impressed by this unit! I must agree about the size and mounting, it HAS to be this way to be a univeral installation. It's not really a problem, most stereo installs aren't "invisible"...
If I didn't enjoy tearing my own car apart all the time, I'd probably sign up for one. For now though, I'll just have to add myself to the list of people hoping for a decent ATX dc-dc power supply =)
-Matt
Public PGP key available on http://keyserver.pgp.com/pks/lookup?...@MyRealBox.com
One of our design goals was to "blow the others out of the water" with our system
I am talking with a friend of mine that is a hardware engineer and we are thinking of offering a motorized SVGA or XGA display that fits in a single DIN size slot for people who don't want to tear up their dash to custom-fit their LCD.
Any thoughts on this?
It all depends on the price, at least to me (poor college student
ditto.
"if everything is under control, you're not going fast enough!"
Something like this that has at least a 7" XGA with build in slot loading DVD/CD-ROM drive
Price would depend on the quality.
[This message has been edited by Gex (edited 02-27-2001).]
clarions are way to expensive and there not worth the extra money they want. Get a oem if u can or a no name vga monitor. The one clarion a demo car here in town has only 256 colors and a slow refresh rate i imagine they fixed that in there new ones.
<p align="center"><a href="http://www.mobilemediacentral.com"><img border="0" src="http://www.mobilemediacentral.com/images/logos/mmclogo.jpg" width="171" height="151"></a></p>
No, we're not using a Clarion display. We're using an OEM flatpanel LCD module with a VGA converter board, designing our own plastic/metal housing, with motorized out/up action.
We are planning on having a mono, backlit secondary display for EQ settings, etc. that is visible on the front when the TFT panel is retracted (hidden). This way if you just want to see what song you're listening to, you don't have to have the full 7" display visible. Plus you can have weather, news, or traffic information displayed, while you're watching a movie, for example. That way textual information won't disturb the color video display.
We believe we can get the cost at or below (hopefully the latter!) the cost of video displays made by Alpine, Kenwood, and Clarion. This should be possible since we're doing all the engineering work ourselves. Raw materials aren't too expensive with this type of product, at least compared to the cost of one of the commercial video displays available now...
I didn't mean to imply that you use or are going to use that Clarion unit. I just hope it looks as good.
I'm not talking about the screen quality as I hope so see at least a svga screen in yours. I'm sure the Clarion uses the same !@$% screens as the rest.
Here is a pic of the same unit with the display closed:
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