Car PC / Carputer - Can it be done? with Choccymonster aka Dave Turner

At stage, the modding bug had hit really really hard and I was looking now at the inside of the car and in particular the car audio. As standard the car had a Sony headunit that was good but had no bluetooth, no USB, and only an aux-in in the glovebox.

So, first of all I fitted an old Fli (very cheap) subwoofer to the car by taking a feed off of the rear speakers. This worked, but it was poor quality. I also had an idea for a couple of years to put a PC into a car and use it for a fair few things, but mostly a media centre.

The first attempt had a grand budget of £70 as I wasn't sure if it would even work.

Dave Turner heard about my plight and generously supplied me with a 1Ghz mini-atx board and specifically designed M2-atx in car power supply for a PC. Dave donated these parts free of charge and helped enormously in getting the first machine up and running.

I couldn't afford a new headunit at this stage so came up with the idea of putting a screen in the sunvisor (yes, mad I know) so the search started for a really thin LCD monitor. I then came across a Lilliput 7" USB powered monitor for about £40 on eBay. I also managed to get a spare sunvisor from a breakers yard, as I was sure I was going to butcher the current one.

The screen fitting went very very well and was done in under 2 hours. The carputer then went on to be fitted, adding old memory and old IDE hard drive.

The project was completed and was in budget. This setup was sold soon after as it was only built as an experiment. Carputer mk2 then went into the planning phase.... more to follow later.