Thread: Aldaris's 2003 Sentra SE-R Spec V CarPC

Here are some pics of the car to see what it looked like before installing the computer!

Here are some pics of the computer that I described before. It's not in the car yet, but its time will come!

I've spent the past 5 months working on my own Media Center. (since it was the winter, I couldn't do anything anyway!)

I decided to create my own Media Center for many reasons. First, I didn't find any media center already existing that attracted me. . . for the look & feel, user friendliness and ergonomics. And also because it's one of my passions and it's my job to code software!

I based the design of my media center on the Microsoft Windows Media Center because I found the look so cool!! But I want to say that all images were done by me. I didn't steal anything!

In 5 months I succeeded to release a version that can be used in a car. For now, it can play songs and can manage a playlist very easily. I stopped the development for now because the summer is coming and I want to concentrate my work on the installation of the computer in the car.

The thing that took long to do was the skinning system. I made it so it can be fully skinnable. All the interfaces are stored in a xml file. So when the program starts, it parses the xml file to ckeck what the screen should look like. This way, you can change all images, buttons, etc.. You can not only change the images, you can move the items in the screen!! You can also remove items if you want or add new ones!


Here are some screenshots of the Media Center :

Main Menu screen :


Music screen. The image shows the playlist with some songs in it and the song that is playing in the bottom with the visualization :


Screen to add songs. You can add an artist, an album or songs. When you add something to the playlist, a small message appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen that fades out after 3 seconds.

Nice!

Backstreet Boys???

Peace,

Rafster

Before I started bending steel and solding anything, I wanted to make a king of prototype to be sure that my idea was fesable and not too crazy!!

So the easiest way and priceless way I found was to make it in LEGO blocks. Yes I really said LEGO!!

Anyway, the mechanism is kind of simple, for now it won't work be motorized..give me a chance! hehehe

So here are a couple of pics to show you how it works!

This is the bottom of the bucket from the compartment in the top of the dash that I got in a junkyard (for those who knows how a sentra is made will understand) :


The prototype in his close form. (imagine the big lego plate is the screen )

legos are cool, i still play with them

with a lot of imagination it could be possible, but I'm not sure it would be solid enough and it would be hard to join the screen and legos... maybe with crazy glue!! hahaha