Thread: 97 Toyota Tacoma You gotta See This. NEW UPDATE with 100+ pics on 7-4-03

I've read through this thread a couple of times now, and all I can say is, wow! cproaudio, you sir, are to be congratulated. And all your pics, thank you All I can say is that after seeing them, I feel much more comfortable about dipping my feet into rearranging my dash to install my own carputer. Excellant work.

P.S. I agree with you about the Linux issue. I like to think I know my way around IT generally, but I've not managed to do a single thing with Linux! It makes no sense, and I much prefer the M$ way of doing things (although I prefer W2K to the XP telly-tubby mode)

Man cproaudio....I have to chime in here. I am a veteran installer (lol) from the late 80's and gave up in the early 90's due to local economy and have been in the corporate world til somewhat recently. Back in my day the big thing for me was building custom current sensing and timing circuits for windows until Twindows came out. I'm a couple years older than you and I have to admit that I'm kinda out of it but since the advent of WiFi and being involved in WISP for a while I've been contemplating the idea of connecting to my car while in the house lead to searching the net and finding MediaEngine and ultimately your project. Man I would hate to see what we could do together! Anyways I just wanted to give my appreciation and say keep it up!

Oh and I wanted to say this...You seem a lot like me and I wanted to tell you about another love of mine...LASERS!! I bring this up because you mentioned a heads up display. In the early 90's I had a 81 Blazer with 38" tires and wanted night vision. Ripped my dash apart and installed a CRT in the dash and reversed the leads on the yoke and got some infrared laser diodes from digikey and man!! It worked a lot better than I thought it would. just wanted to mention it and am looking forward to your next project! hell....who knows...maybe we can collaborate!

~Todd

Damn poolgodtodd, register a forum just to write a comment? Now that's showing appreciation to my work. Thanks. My project was limited to the available goodies at the time of installation and limited budget and time. I'm currently in the process of buying a house so I have turned all my financial resources toward my new home. This project is now deem 100% complete as I have no desire to make any changes. Once I've settled down and saved up enough money I will start an even bigger project.

Matt, Unfortunately OBD-I is not as standardized as OBD-II. Each manufacturer will have their own scanner. You best bet is to goto the local dealer and ask the technicians what kind of scanners they use and if they're PC compatible. Another way is to use IO boards and install all the sensors to the board and write your own software. It's a pain in the *** to do.

JamShady, I'm glad that you feel more comfortable about rearranging your dash after seeing my setup. Once you get it done, you'll appreciate the work you've done and how much better your dash will work for you. I'm glad I did my dash like this because the screen doesn't look out of place. I still have my AC vents and I still have my radio.

Thanks for the kind words. I really appreciate them, makes me proud of my ability. BTW sorry for replying so late matt and jam. I usually wait and reply to couple of comments at a time so the thread doesn't get too long. Again I appreciate your comments.

anyone know what the fastest cpu I can put in my 96 blazer would be? Is there a limit to how good a computer I can put in my car? I would like to put a p4 2.8 in with a new high end ati card and whatever else might come along. Any help would be appreciated as I am new to this whole carputer thing.
Thanks
Mike

Your computers speed is going to be limited by the amount of power you can supply to it and possibly the heat that this thing will generate. A full P4 system is going to suck ALOT of power I think the CPU alone is around 70 watts, a highend graphics card will suck probably another 30 watts or so. Typical power supplys for highend systems need to supply 300 or more watts to get enough power to this stuff. You can by inverters that will supply this much power, but they are somewhat ineffiecent and can add noise to the audio for the car, and you may need to upgrade your alternator or battery to get an adequate supply of power to these things, however, its still feasible. The other thing you would then have to worry about is heat disspisation, especially if your putting this thing in your trunk or hidden someplace, summers will kill your system without a lot of active and noisy cooling.

To answer your question, if your able to supply enough power / cooling to this thing, the sky is the limit.

Personally I would not recommend going with the absolute fastest computer available, although it is possible. I would also try and keep the power to a mimum and get a motherboard that is integrated as possible. For my own setup, I also wanted a powerful system with a good GFX card to run my DirectX interface, but I tried to keep the power consumption to a minimum. I went with a OPUS DC-DC 150 watt power supply (the biggest I could find) a antlon XP 2000+ 512mb of Ram and Abit MK79G-N which has an integrated GeForce 4 video card. This is really quite fast, I get boot times of 35 seconds and get a couple hunderd FPS in my DirectX interface and it runs everything from GPS to DVDs without hesitation. It might have some trouble with some really intense 3D games, but thats about it. Anything else, faster computer wouldn't pay off too much.

Originally Posted by icerain

anyone know what the fastest cpu I can put in my 96 blazer would be? Is there a limit to how good a computer I can put in my car? I would like to put a p4 2.8 in with a new high end ati card and whatever else might come along. Any help would be appreciated as I am new to this whole carputer thing.
Thanks
Mike

Absolutly amazing. Great job, I can't wait to see the final product.

But I have one question...
I see you are interfacing your alarm setup to the carputer using cliffords own serial connector. Using the software, you can control a lot of what the alarm does. Mainly, the windows, and door locks. In addition to being able to control many settings.

But you also plan to wire up the locks/doors/windows to your own relays with will be serial controlled. Why the redundancy? The only reasoning I can think of, is that with your own custom relay setup, you can write software that will allow more than just local control, but internet control - something that the clifford software does not offer.

-edit: Okay I didn't scroll down far enough to see your finished product. Wooow... perhaps I should read the entire thread to see answers to my question, before posting. But if my q wasn't answered in the thread, please do... i'm curious

Accessing Cliffnet Wizard puts the alarm in programming mode. It's not a good idea b/c there's a chance that you might change a setting that you're not suppose to and cause the alarm to function differently. The AUX channels, Windows control, and start are in different setup screens. It takes about 10 seconds to change from window control page to start up page.
The relay control module is so that I can have touch screen window control, door locks and other functions instantly. I have remote desktop control setup already so yes, I can control my CarPC from my bedroom or from the internet or my laptop.

Did you shave or get rid of the hard wired controls in the car, for windows and door locks? Not something I would do for a daily driver, but for a show car it would be kind of cool to get rid of everything and relocate it to an lcd.

Which remote desktop control software are you using? Thats pretty crazy.

But how does that work? If the car and computer are off... how can you access it? Is something wired to the WOL port to turn the computer and car on remotely, so you can access it and then shut it off? Like, with the Opus power supply, that one lead is connected to the switched power line in the ignition - which is off. I thought that no matter what you did, that OPUS would stay off... but apparantly that isn't the case.

I wanted to put 802.11g in my carputer to be able to wirelessly transfer data to my home pc, but I didn't think it was possible to remotely turn on the computer using wifi. I plan on installing a remote start / security system, but I thought that remote starting the car using relays would be impossible, due to the security system in place. Unless the relay was wired to the security brain in such a way where it turned it off? Damn... thats probably getting above me.