Thread: more confused after searching! noob questions/carputer parts related

1. why do you say epias are basic? I have an epia and I do everything you listed and more. I mean what did you want to do in your car that would make the EPia basic? that's your first answer

2. also answered by #1

3. there is a pansonic slot load dvd floating around on ebay look for that. Otherwise you can run a usb/firewiree (ieee-1394) drive up front to eliminate the long ide cable problem.

4. as for placement the best and easiest location would be in the trunk, I dont understand how this would interfere with your backseat passangers. Also if you go with the trunk route get any motherboard that you want, slap a beefy video card, maybe a mobile processor for less juice, etc... feel me?

based on everything i read people most of the time, if compared to a mini atx. the EPIAs seem to be around 1 gigz compared to most of the solutions on a miniatx which is usually pent/athlon M at higher speeds.

hrmm so EPIA boards even though i think the fastest is the eden m9000? is that really fast enough for mp3s while doing GPS calculations?

what GPS software do you use? how long per route calculation?

do you know the specific model of that dvd drive? or suggest any that are somewhat smaller or better than the pioneer one. i might be reading the dimensions wrong actually... 5.8 x 1.6 inches L x W isnt that big actually

i cant believe firewire/usb external dvd drives didnt come to mind. im so used to doing desktops w/ scsi and ide, gota think external and small for this. =D

Heck yes, I played MP3s on my 333 while browsing the internet back in 98, and GPS is pretty dang basic, all the hard work is done by the GPS itself. You have a pretty skewed idea about PC power!

BTW, the fastest Epia is the M10000. It can encode movies while playing music, browsing the web, etc. It's plenty fast for a CarPC.

Originally Posted by Chairboy

all the hard work is done by the GPS itself. You have a pretty skewed idea about PC power!

appearantly you have a pretty skewed idea about something. if by 'hard work' you mean 'resource intensive', you couldn't be further off base.

However, the EPIAs can certainly handle GPS navigation. It takes about two secconds for my 9000 to calculate the route for a 300 mile trip (running street atlas).

If you've got the money for and means to cool a mini atx though, go for it.

seems like either EPIAs or mini atx would be able to easily handle what i had in mind.

anyone recall some good mini atx mobos + cpu combinations, 2-4 pci slots, 1 agp thats practically enough, few USB, firewire, good cache size, fsb, etc? also a good vid card? im tempted to go with a high end radeon/geforce but then again power limitations come to mind.

it seems like trunk mounting is the best option. a mini-atx seems quite more apealing to me since i get to chose my own vid card instead of some generic built in one with the EPIAs

how is video playback(dvds vcds) on the EPIAs actually compared to say a radeon 8*** mobility?

btw thank you all for the input +D

video playback isn't the kind of intensive use that radeons shine under. I would say you couldn't tell the difference.

time for some 3dmax! results? =D

[QUOTE=robiewp]appearantly you have a pretty skewed idea about something. if by 'hard work' you mean 'resource intensive', you couldn't be further off base.[QUOTE]

I'm guessing you're one of the 'the meat comes from the grocery store' type of guys, while I'm more of the 'the meat comes from a butchered cow' type of guy.

The hard work is receiving a signal from up to 12 NAVSTAR satellites, then, based on the IDs being received, do a 3 dimensional transformation to convert the timing data into a geographic fix to within 30 or so feet.

The amount of math needed is incredible, as is the precision needed to know the difference between receiving timing signal a239598 at time index 12:34:34:45:34 GMT and receiving it at 12:34:34:45:30 GMT.

So yes, all the hard work is done by that innocent looking little brick that you seem to take for granted.

After that, a database lookup on a PC and drawing some pictures doesn't seem that big a deal anymore, does it? BTW, did it on my Palm V back in the late 90s, I'm pretty comfortable at saying that an Epia 10K can probably swing it too.

I guess you've proved me wrong by stating that 'it takes a lot of math' to perform a triangulation.

It seems to me that some of your 'meet comes from the grocery store' too. "a database loookup on a PC and drawing some pictures doesn't seem to be a big deal". I'm not going to spout information i'd have to look up, but anyone who has taken more than an introductory programming class has experience with just how intensive database lookups and image rendering can be.

After that, some basic trigonometry and other operations capable of being performed by a $5 calculater don't seem like a big deal. Don't get me wrong, a GPS certainly is cool, and what it does is impressive, but the ammount of math required is not.