2005 Ford BF Fairmont Ghia CarPC Install
Hi Guys,
This has been a while in the making and is finally coming together. There have been a couple of threads on here about fitting PC's to the Australian Ford BA/BF premium sound color screens and I thought I would also make one to tell about the problems I came across and the solutions that worked for me. My main goal was to have plenty of music that was easily accessible as well as reliable Bluetooth phone functionality (Still working on this part!)
I was given an Asus EeePC laptop with a stuffed hard drive and fitted a 128gb SSD to it. This little laptop fits pretty well in the glovebox I loaded a copy of Tiny7 onto it and the boot times were better than I thought.
I installed Centrafuse and was happy with the way it performed, the laptop only has 1gb of RAM at the moment but will up that when I find a 2gb stick.The main problem with using the factory Ford screen is its native 15khz refresh rate, I have gone through the steps of using soft15khz, powerstrip and even an ArcadeVGA card but could never get it to display properly. I came across a thread on the Australian Ford Forums which made mention of this neat little $40 VGA to RGBS/CGA/EGA/AV/Scard off eBay......
This worked straight away and has some nice picture adjustments built in...the only problem was that it needs a constant 5v to keep the settings. So back to eBay and bought one of these......
I have ran a fused cable straight from the battery into the glovebox area, I really want this install to be hidden so this is the best place that I could find....
When the top of the glovebox is refitted, none of this is visible. Still need to drill a hole in the glovebox to run the cables to the laptop.....
