vonirkinshtine

Hey guys (and gals)! My name is Eric and I live in Charlotte NC. I'm a mechanical engineering major (soon to be a mechanical engineering graduate!) at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

My car is a 1999 Ford Crown Victoria P71. I ran a search and found that I am not the only person to ever put a computer in an old cop car.

I plan to start with retrofitting the guts from a desktop (yes, not the best platform, but I can't argue with free, lol) into a more shock resistant enclosure. On the front end I will use a Motorola MW520 from an old cop car:

Yeah, it's a bit on the big side, but since it's not uncommon to see these monitors in these cars, I figure it's a streamlined application.

Anyways, I've been snooping the FAQs trying to get an idea of what I'll need to make a stable system. My first hurdle is going to be finding the best place to put the CPU. My gut says it would be easier to control the operating environment if the CPU was in the cab, so I'm thinking of making a center console to house everything. Also, there's alot of auxillary power leads running throughout the car, I just need to find the one that would have been used for the police computer and use an intelligent DC-DC power supply.

Anyways, that's all I've figured out. As I get rolling with this project I'll get more solid answers. I look forward to working with you guys!