After being happy with my Epia install for about a year and 4 months now, I was looking for some more power. Don't know really why but I guess people always have the need for more speed or something like that...
So after seeing a christmass special on CarTFT.com wich included a Biostar I94GM-I4 ITX, a Intel Celeron M440-1,86GHz, and 1Gb of ram for only 298,-€ I went along and bought it. Since I was planning on selling the Epia to a friend completely I also needed a new case and power suply. So I ordered a M300 case wich is about the same size as the Voom case I had before but it had a lot of more space inside. Recommended for that case was the M3-ATX PSU so I ordered this one as well.
First of all I made two connectors that would make it easy to connect an disconnect the PC from the car. One is used to power it (12V, ACC, GND, AMP-RMT) the other one is used to power my screen and hub (12V, GND, 5V, GND). Holes were drilled into the case to put these connectors
I also made a connecter to connect the PC to my Regulate 12V power suply at home with a switch on it to simulate ignition.
On my epia the HQCT was connected to it externally in a little housing. Since there was a lot of extra space in the M300 enclosure I wanted to put the HQCT in the case. This way it would be much easier to remove the PC out of the car. This was my main goal with this new install. Easy removal of the PC to do maintenance on it.
So I started of by drilling some extra holes in the case and putting the HQCT in there.
The next thing was the HDD. I wanted a big one! My 60Gb laptop drive in the Epia was completely full and using an external disk often gave me problems using hibernation so I wanted a big drive in the PC. Since laptop drives with a lot of storage are pretty expencive, a 320Gb Western Digital Caviar 3,5" drive was bought. This should fit in the case according to the manual. I was a little afraid though it would not fit in there on the space provided because it would touch the PSU. So I drilled some extra holes in the tray and moved the HDD to the other side in the case. I used spacers to clear some distance between de HDD and the tray because otherwise the power suply cable wouldn't fit.
Finally, all the other components were fitted in the case.
The first two weeks, the car PC was sitting next to his big brother at home to put on the software and making it work ok. Both the car PC as the desktop were connected to my 22" monitor. A button on the monitor makes it easy to switch between both of them. Also a wireles desktop was used to control the car PC. This was a little inconvenient since there now were 2 keyboard and 2 mice on my desk making me getting them mixed up all of the time.
Now it was time to put it in the car. First of all, the little Epia was removed and the wiring for the HQCT that was still in there was build in the new Intel. At this time I put both PC's side to side and you can clearly see the difference in size is not big. Altough I couldn't dream of putting the HQCT and a 3,5" drive in the voom case. And the M300 has a compact flash slot build in on top of it (wich I don't use however).
As I allready mentioned, I wanted the PC to be easy removable. So I came up with an idea of using two little doorlocks to keep the PC in place. On the bottom both aluminium slats slide into the carpet and on the top the doorlocks snap over them so the the PC is held in place. It's solid and won't move and the locks are pretty firm so unless great force is applied on them, they won't unlock.
Some new install pics:
PC behind the sliding door, USB connections and switch in storage compartiment, Sub-remote from my DLS-amp and some pics of the trunk.
Then it was time to put the PC on, so I filipped the ignition and ................
..........
...... .....
........................
...No thing!!!
To make a long story short: The M3-ATX isn't the best PSU a person can buy. Specialy not if you got a diesel engine. I did an entire review of it that can be seen
here so I'm not going into the details anymore. After a few days of hairscratching and using the F-word a lot of times I now use a switch that enables me to startup the PC after the engine is running. This is temporarily though, I'm ordering an M2-ATX. It will fit the case so I'm getting rid of the M3.
Other then that, after a week of tweaking setting up things right in the car my new buddy works like a charm. The POST is a lot faster then on the Epia and booting also is about 10 seconds faster. Only resuming from hibernate is not that much faster. It seems to be but after the "windows is resuming" slider (this is REALLY fast though) is gone there is a few seconds of black screen until music starts to play. It has something to do with my USB devices because when they're disconnected the black screen isn't there anymore and it comes out of hibernate really fast. I have to figure out what causes the delay. Once booted, everything works really fast and reliable.
I'm still using Roadrunner as frondend. I really like it and the fact that its perfect to customize to everybody's personal needs. After using the iDrive skin for more then a year now, I switched to the simplistique skin (Sorry Enforcer, Yours is still a great skin but I thought it was time for a new look to come with the new PC).
The Simplistique skin was really modified quite a bit before I started using it. The original fonts were not too great in my opinion altough the fonts used for the buttons were really cool. So I changed all the fonts used in the skin to those. Also many screens were removed. I don't use internet in the car, so I have no use for weather, traffic, e-mail, web,... They're all gone. Also DVD is gone. Don't use it, have a 320Gb HD now. Who needs DVD? This way, the entire second menu screen was removed. With the second menu screen button I now control Gamma. Also an entire night skin was fabricated by myself. At night I want the skin to have about the same colour as the rest of my dashboardlights so I changed colours of the skin to the way I liked them making myself a nightskin. Further than that, a bunch of little things were changed, most of them I don't even remember. Some of them were, radio skin to handle RDS, GPS skin to work with iG 2.1.2 and the clock on all skins changes day/night (thanks enforcer!).
One big thing was added to the skin also. Since it's designed to work without a wireless connection I wanted an easy way to add music and video to the PC. The sollution for this I found in JohnWPB's Digital FX skin. He has a screen in there where you can copy from an USB device to the music or video folder of your HDD. At first I simply copied and pasted his scripts and put his little scrip executables in a folder in the simplistique skin. Didn't expect it to work tough, but hey.... it did. After looking some more at this I saw more possibilities. Since I use different folders for different genres of music, it wasn't very convienent I could only copy to my main music folder. So I added some lines in the skin and RR.ini and got it working. I made different skins for copying audio, video, pictures and data. And in each of those I can copy the content to 5 different locations (could be more but then I will have to change the design of the skin). Thank you for coming up with this functionality JohnWPB! It's really great, works lik a charm and everybody should have it. Thanks!
So that's basicly it. Here are some screenshots of the new pc in the car:
---Main Menu Night----------Main Menu Day----------Audio Night--------------GPS Night---------------GPS Day--------
------Entire Dash------------Video Playing---------------NFSU2-----------New Utilities screen--
--Copy Media Selector----Copy Audio Screen---
To finish I also made a little movie of the PC in action. It's made on the 22" screen but it is actually the car PC. As you can see it responds a lot quicker then an Epia would. Also playing NFSU2 is no problem. On the movie all the settings in the game set to minimum but I can set them fairly high on 800x600 and still have a pretty decent framerate. Also visualisations, screen and albumart transitions work great on this PC as they didn't on the Epia. I'm very happy with the speed of the celeron M440!
)
Linear Mode
