ertnec

Hi all

I'm after some help really on the hardware side of thing...

I'm in need of hardware which will be capable of powering 3 seperate displays, and take into account the 'possibility' of 2 seperate interfaces. Quite complicated so far...

Basically the car is a Vauxhall omega..

Display 1 (Primary) will be touchscreen interface controlling the main UI and such, this will be in a custom housing where the old stereo used to be.

Display 2 will be a smaller 3.5" screen built into the dials where the old TID display used to be. This will be used to SatNav (Sygic DRIVE or something similiar), aswell as parking camera's.

Display 3 will be split between 2 screens, and go to the rear headrests. They will seperately show movies/DVD's, and also allow access to either control the main playlist of tunes in the car, or have there own seperate playlist created which will play via seperate headphones.

Display 1 and 3 will also have the ability to display the same movie in tandem, so say parked up in a carpark, on a ferry crossing, major motorway holdup, I can stick on a film on the front screen, and then this will play via the rears too and come out of the cars soundsystem, while say Display 2 can become a combined RSS feed from traffic alerts or anything else.

Now I know power is not readily available in large quantities in a car, and this will be some serious undertaking. I'll be running the entire system via a custom built Linux setup built entirely from the Gentoo distro (customised to the hilt) and most likely with my own interface system. So controlling 3 screens via X shouldn't be too difficult (placing/cloning displays etc).

I'll also need 2 soundcards. 1 primary 2.1 system (for the main car audio) and a regular stereo output for the rear screen sounds. Again, it should be easy enough to allocate which card handles what via ALSA.

But its just the hardware phase which I'm a bit 'curious' about.

1 idea, was to have Display 1 and 3 running on 1 system, and a lower-powered computer purely to handle the 2nd display with the satnav/cameras/rss. But thinking of what might happen, I'd rather keep all 3 screens on the 1 system if possible.

It's not like there will be any intensive apps running (3D Games and such), but I'd like the ability to play some HD content on there (even though the displays will be max of 800x600), alot of the stuff I have is in HD, so that needs to be taken into consideration.

Any ideas on where to begin on the hardware setups which may help?

Cheers

MP3Car.com