Thread: 2006 VW Jetta CarPC

After gathering the parts for a few weeks I installed my CarPC in my 2006 Jetta over the weekend.

I initially fabricated by own bezel using a double-din installation kit and the headrest mount that came with the monitor but didn't really like the way it looked so I switched to the bybyte bezel. The VM7000 was slightly bigger than the frame and glued inside it's housing, but after a couple hours with a dremel, and xacto knife and a glue gun I got it to work and still look normal.

Initially after hooking up the monitor to the accessory 12V I was getting vertical bars on the screen. I fixed it by running its power from the 12V bus on the PC power supply (along with the XM USB interface board).

The PC is based on a Zotac single Atom board in a mini-box ITX enclosure (+ 160GB 2.5" SATA HDD and 2GB RAM). It's running Centrafuse on top of Windows 7. I'm using the MJS xmdirect USB interface for XM and an earthmate BT-20 GPS I had.

Sound is through an Alpine 4-Channel amp to the factory speakers. I spent several hours messing with getting the 4 channel sound to work in Windows (No bass whatsover, Centrafuse stability issues with the Realtek drivers VS windows drivers, etc) before I gave up and used a Y-splitter into a single audio output on the PC. It sounds great though, and most audio is 2-channel anyway though.

I tried to use an ADS USB FM tuner but it won't run natively in Centrafuse under Windows 7, and the workaround I found led to Centrafuse crashing constantly. Reception also wasn't great when it did work.

Next phase is to add an HD radio tuner, and get a better GPS (probably the BU-353). I'll probably eventually upgrade to a better, transreflective touchscreen monitor as well as switch to an SSD hard drive.













Parts List:

http://www.mini-box.com
- M350 Universal Mini-ITX enclosure
- M3-ATX Plug-In Smart car PC PSU
- Zotac ION B-E mini-ITX Single Atom N230 Motherboard + CPU
- VM7000 7" touchscreen

http://store.mp3car.com/
- MJS-XMD2 XM MiniTuner USB PC Interface

http://www.thenerds.net/
- Scosche VW2317B Stereo Installation Kit
- Scosche VW01B Wire Harness

http://www.mo-co-so.com/
- Double DIN Lilliput 701/629 Monitor Frame

http://www.bestbuy.com/
- Audiovox XM Direct Kit
- Alpine 200W 4-Channel AMP

+ Cables, speaker wiring, etc