Thread: 1995 Honda Civic Sedan EX - My First CarPC

Hi, yesterday I connected the M2-ATX to my Mother Board, and using the regular PC ATX Power Supply to fake the car battery.

I followed the guidance posted on this thread.

It works very nice! M2-ATX wakes up my CarPC around 5 seconds after the "ignition", and will shutdown or hibernate it 5 seconds after the "ignition" is off. In my test environment the ignition is a switch button (I took the power switch from the old PC case).

I've configured windows to hibernate, Control Panel / Power Options / Advanced / "When I press the power button on my computer" = "Hibernate", so when M2-ATX sends the power-off signal Windows will hibernate instead of shutdown.

This week I will try to power on the Lilliput from the M2-ATX as well. After that I will be ready to try it on the car (real environment).

One of my external USB Hard Drives stop working, and I guess it was the USB to IDE adaptor.

So I opened the HDD case and removed the 80GB HardDrive which is a notebook small HDD.

I am replacing my 40GB HDD to this 80GB HDD (both 2.5' notebook HDD).

I will keep the 40GB HDD around just in case I need extra space or just for backup.

Today I bought a molex Y adaptor, so now I have 2 molex (HDD) connectors coming out the M2-ATX.

One is attached to the Hard Disk Drive.

The other is attached to the Lilliput, to do that I cut the cigarrete adapter cable of the Lilliput and connected one wire (the one with white stripes) to the Yellow wire of the molex connector (12V) and the other wire (the black one) to the black wire of the molex connector.

So, When M2-ATX gets "ignition", it started the MoBo and the Lilliput, and will hibernate MoBo and shutdown Lilliput after "ignition" is off. Perfect!

I'm ready to go for the car installation now!

I did my first boot screen today, posted here.

I will work on a Civic boot screen soon.

Hello,

Here are some pictures of my "lab environment", before I take it to the car.

I feel that I'm ready to go now, all hardware was tested and working, Front-end, Skins and apps running.





Besides all the cabling and HeadUnit Aux input, I need also to add a Fuse. Will do it and post pictures in the future.

Any comments are appreciated! I plan to go to the car installation soon.

Thank you!

Originally Posted by moleman

Vlad,
Does that keyboard have a delete key? I was wondering if I could use it to get into my bios if I need to.

Hi... It has backspace but has not Del, CTRL or ALT keys. When I need to enter the BIOS I plug a regular keyboard. I think that I wont need the keyboard once the CarPC is in place, so I choose this small keypad, and its cheap (bought on cduniverse.com)

My headunit is a Kenwood MP3 Player that doesn't have an AUX input.

This weekend I found a cable that connects to the CD Changer connector in the back, but it provides 2 RCAs. So it fools the Kenwood to think its connected to a CD Changer but you can use any RCA device. I bought a RCA to P2 adaptor to plug in the CarPC Sound Card.

This cable is very hard to find. Those who live in Brazil and want directions PM me (it's a small place in Santa Ifigenia street).