This might seem like a dumb question, but I noticed in the computing 101 it mentioned that car climate control was possible. Is that easy to accomplish (only 1 or 2 pci cards need to be made and software is available)?
I am preparing to build a carpc... well sort of, originally I was going to build a low power, low cost, distributed computer system and program the whole thing up in assembly. Mostly because I live in Texas and would have liked to put in in my trunk (heat) and the microcontroller system would have used VERY little power and produced almost no heat.
The things that it MUST do are:
- Digital media playback
- Ipod interface
- Sirus interface
- Climate control
- GPS
- WiFi network creation / expansion / connection
and it would be nice to have:
- RFID tag readers
- Lock / trunk release on RFID scan
- Start car after PIN entered or RFID scanned
- Window control
- Hydra ECU interface
Currently I have a small system that can control locks/windows, read RFID tags, start the car, HDD and usb file reading (almost music playback), GPS (no nav), climate control, and basic ethernet networking. The VGA output is killing me so I decided to look into a full on pc.
Long story short, I have that small system that I can use, but do not have to. How would I go about either interfacing the pc w/ the system I built, or how would I make a carpc that dose all of the tasks (RFID locks would still be micorcontroller based so when the car is asleep I can unlock the doors). Mostly what OS (I know my way around linux and mac, very little windows) would give a good looking interface, let me do climate and window control, and still allow low overhead, also what hardware would I need to look into / build to make it work.
The car is a 96 Mazda Miata, I plan on removing the climate control cluster and the radio to fit a 8" or 8.4" 4:3 display. I am going to try some homebrew transreflective mods and will end up making a LED backlight that auto dims. For the pc processor I have a 2.4ghz core2 duo T7700 (socket P I think) laying around w/o mobo, ram, ect. I end result need 5 channels of audio (LF RF, LR RR. Sub).
Any help, with the carpc solution or where to look to get a new/better idea for generating a VGA output for the microcontroller system, would be greatly appreciated.
O and has anyone used a VM84 or VM80?