Finally, I have gotten some time to post to the forum. It's been a year since i had started on my "low" budget setup.
This is the first variant of my CarPuter
http://www.ort-usa.org/~diman/comp/
I was trying to go for really low budget, thus i had decided to use old hardware. I stopped at Gigabyte mb with two serial ports+usb and Amd 500mhz kII. 128mb Ram. 18+29+free ram ~ $47 plus an expensive 250w inverter from AutoZone(i was too eager) $45($92), a Kogi 14'' Screen $130($222) (after rebates from bestbuy) and i bought serial GPS from deluo for $90($312).
Everything was going kind of smoothly until i decided to stick to a laptop harddrive. I found one on eby 10Gb $20($332) which was VERY CHEAP. Well, you get what you paid for. The hardrive had a password on it, so i had spent and least 3 weeks total of my time to try to remove it. I could not used the professional services cuz they cost 3 times as much as a harddrive itself. Soon after i gave up on the idea of using that harddrive and pulled my old 8gb Samsung 5400 from the working tower.
Later, comes the installation of the operating system, which took me another week to complete, since for some unknown reason the setup always crashed about 15-20 minutes into the install. Only later i had realized that one of my Ram sticks was faulty. Being to axious and tired to complete the install of the OS i had let it go at 64mb
which was no joke at all, it took 1 hour to just format the hardrive and another hour and a half to install. Finally i had operating system, a shoebox and couple devices to be tested.
During the first in Car tests, i would plenty more problems with my system, things like constant restarting upon hitting a bump, or restarting without any particular reason. Things like that had been going for a long time, no matter how many times i had tried to test the system. It drove me crazy. I gave up. and let the project sleep for about 2 months.
During the spring of this year, with the weather getting better i had decided to definitely finish the setup before the end of the summer. I screwed the budget setup i had and ordered Athlon 1800+ and GA-7VM400M(smallAtx) $96.99($428.99) from Newegg and a stick of DDR2 from staples which was supposed to be $25 but i lost my receipt and was not able to file for the rebate, thus it ended up being $50($478.99). the MB worked flawlessly, i was so happy and i thought that i was finally on the right track. I ordered extension wires to pull them from the trunk(vga,two audio,serial,and power) $50($528). I had used my old mini tower case in order to mount the setup. It took up most of the space in my trunk and was always moving around while i rode.
I had rewired GPS connectors, so it pulled the 5v off the powersupply instead of the PS2 port, where i had plugged the wirelless keyboard+mouse combo(IR) $36($564) setup. I had also ordered the ODBII module from
http://obddiagnostics.com/ for $88($652) (cheapest/most features u can find/also it supppors most makes, and not jsut some like scantool.net). Then i had picked up a $25($677) 400W inverter in Costco(which was so much better in value than autozone). Since i wanted an easier way to upload things to the computer i had purchased a Netgear wifi card from Fry's electronics 11g 54mbs $20($697),with the delivery and the rebate included.
I had installed all of this in the tool box I got at Home Depot for $10.00($707)
it took me 3 days, to cut through the plastic and mount the setup within it's boundaries. The computer kept shutting down when an exessive pressure was applied to the top of the fan,it made siren like sounds and turned off. I did some research on this and it happened to be the overflowing of the temperature sensor, whihc was resolved once i had released the pressure, by freeing some space around. Then I got 2 bungie cords at HomeDepot 3.99($711) and mounted all of this to the back of the seats in the rear.
I was pretty excited once everything was put in place and was functioning to it's full capacity. I had drove around, althought the best part of the drive was finding tons of local spots for free internet and chatting with my friends while in the car(of course i could have done it with the laptop, but that's completely different kind of feeling).
Here are my final Specs for the CarPuter
256mb Ram DDR2
1800+ Athlon 1.57ghz
GA-7VM400M MotherBoard
8Gb 5400 RPM Samsung Hard Drive
NetGear WIFI 802.11g 54mbs
ODBII module
Deluo GPS
400W Inverter.
IR keyboard+mouse in one
total Cost of install
$711 +~$50 for extra things i forgot to take into the account.
Also here is a good recommedation, never try to do anything budget unless u have done something similar before.
Some things to do on the setup. Add a DVD-rom to the front, plus make the sound better(remove the noise caused by the inverter from the line).
Thank You for reading
And finaly here are the pics of the setup.
