2005 Ford BF Fairmont Ghia CarPC Install

**RXII** · 10-07-2012, 08:54 PM

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.....

**RXII** · 10-07-2012, 10:02 PM

The next step was the touchscreen, this was probably the most expensive part of the build and I wanted to make sure I got a picture I was happy with before the investment. A guy on eBay sells a great quality touchscreen to suit this screen size and comes with the driver disc.....installation was pretty straight forward

Up and running!

Also added an ELM327 bluetooth OBDII module.......

To keep the factory appearance I wanted to be able to power up the PC using a factory button, my car has fog light button but then had a blank beneath it. I bought another momentary fog light switch and swapped over the fascia to the blank one.

I pulled the laptop keyboard off and located the power switch, luckily the pins off it were exposed so I was able to solder 2 wires to it. Then I filed a small hole for the new power switch cable to neatly exit the side of the laptop and put it back together.

Temporary plugs fitted to get it going!

I have ordered a BU-353 S4 SiRF USB GPS Receiver and still need to sort out a microphone for the phone side of things. Suggestions for a good noise cancelling microphone?

Still to do......

Fit GPS....ordered
Fit Microphone
Fill up HDD with media!

**meddler** · 10-08-2012, 12:45 AM

Nice work mate. Loving the thermocouple plugs. lol. Keep the updates coming!

**RXII** · 10-08-2012, 04:59 AM

Originally Posted by meddler

Nice work mate. Loving the thermocouple plugs. lol. Keep the updates coming!

Thanks mate, yeah those were the only plugs I could find while at work!

Going into Jaycar to get something better during the week! Got the GPS unit today, getting it going now.......

Cheers,
RXII

**PhilG** · 10-08-2012, 09:27 AM

If the laptop has a modem and you don't use it, that's a great place to solder the power wires to. Then you just plug the power switch into the phone jack. I did that on mine, works perfect.

Interfacing to the factory screen looks great, nice clean install!

**daywalker03** · 10-11-2012, 06:49 PM

I know it probably doesn't directly correspond to anything in the US, but what US model Ford is the closest in overall appearance, just so I have some frame of reference to picture this.

daywalker03

**RXII** · 10-11-2012, 07:28 PM

Originally Posted by daywalker03

I know it probably doesn't directly correspond to anything in the US, but what US model Ford is the closest in overall appearance, just so I have some frame of reference to picture this.

daywalker03

The car is a 4 litre Inline 6 with a 6sp ZF Auto, its classed as a large car here in Australia

Cheers,
RXII