Thread: 1st Build - Monitor Advice...

..Yes, another noobie, I can hear you all groan from here!

First a brief background. I have a background in PCs & middle of the road car audio installation (amps, customs sub enclosures, nothing major), but after a year's worth of pondering and reading forums / web pages etc, I fancy giving the car PC thing a shot. According to my wife, I'm too old to be doing such things and should leave car PCs to younger folks.... but what does she know! I'm a bloke in need of a new project / hobby. I'm not sure that an Jaguar S-Type is the most appropriate recipient of a car PC, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway!

Currently, I'm sourcing a 2nd hand glove box and will use that to cut / shut and assess it's suitability for housing a mini-ATX custom PC. I'm also researching power supplies, cases and motherboards, but one thing that I could do with some advice on, is the TFT screen.

I'm quite lucky in that my dash houses a double-din stereo and next to it is a built-in pop-out mobile phone. I won't need the stereo (I'll put an FM tuner in the PC) or the phone (I'm hoping to have a PC Bluetooth connection to my main phone), so I'll have a nice big hole in the dash slightly higher than stereo and almost twice as wide to play with.

I want a factory looking install (whilst it won't exactly match an original Jaguar sat-nav install, it needs to fool casual observers that it is in fact factory), so it'll only be the screen that goes in this space and everything else will be hidden in the glove box. I'll build a custom bezel for it (I've fabricated a centre console for another car in the past, so this doesn't worry me too much!) which I'll need to match to the climate panel.

My issue is which screen to go for? I am looking for as large a touchscreen as I can fit in the gap (height will be the determining factor here and I need to do some measurements), that ideally doesn't have any buttons on the front of it, or has a panel I can remove. I will be fitting an intelligent PSU and whilst I want the PC to have a shut down delay after the ignition is turned off, I would like the screen to go off immediately (for security reasons).

As I'll be controlling the PC & volume via the touch screen, I would like a screen without buttons (or that I can remove), but I'm not sure if that's going to be possible given my wish to have the screen go off with the ignition, but the PC stay on for a while.

What are your thoughts on this? Am I asking too much? I did read that if some touchscreens are shut down before the PC, it can upset WinXP (my preferred OS)..... I'd welcome your thoughts / recommendations on this.

Thanks,

Mark