Linux Based CarPC

Uber-Review writes "If you have been looking for a Linux based car PC. One man has made this a reality and documented putting together a Linux based car PC. Some of the features of this on board car PC is it can automatically sniff and record locations of wireless access points and plot them with GPS. You can watch a movie, browse the internet, get weather forecasts and stream Direct TV from your house right to your car. For an added bonus, you can remote start the car, and connect to it from inside the house and use SSH in, and transfer files without even getting off the couch."

No Carputer (tm) is complete without this....

[Goyuix]

Mp3car MTSVO-SC Fully motorized VGA Touch Screen
http://www.mp3car.com/store/product_info.php?cPath =25&products_id=120 [mp3car.com]

(not affiliated in anyway)

Re:Too much work

[superpeach]

Truthfully, theres so much support and info out there to set a carputer up with windows, I find very few reasons to make me want to spend more time with linux for it.

The hardest part of getting a computer into your car is the getting the computer into the car part, not the installing of the OS. Once the hardware is in there you can install whatever you want on it.

That might just be me though, trying to do it cheap :) I found that just getting an old laptop and sticking it in the glove box was easiest. It even shuts itself down nicely when you turn the engine off thanks to acpi telling it when the "AC adapter" is disconnected.

Been doing this myself.

[shotgunefx]

I've been working on this for a couple months now. Though I used a laptop mounted in a docking station bolted to the top of the trunk using a VCR bracket.

Outside of the lilliput 8" touchscreen, most of it has been pretty cheap. The laptop was a Dell CPTv I had. Slow but fast enough. I got a docking station,dvd, dc adapter and some more memory for around $150.

I use a lilliput 8" touchscreen molded into the double din radio slot. Dumped my head unit totally. Put a small Sirius Skymate radio and embedded it into the dash. The Starmate goes to the laptop which goes to the amp.

I found some Hitachi Endurastar automotive 2.5 HDD s on ebay for about $60 shipped a piece. Good deal. A little slow but I got them working at zero degrees.

For input eventually I'll finish my indash keyboard, (A hacked up Traveler PS3100), but now I'm using a Dreamgear mini usb keyboard made for the PS2. I hacked off the cord and replaced it with a retractable usb cord.

Mostly everything has been pretty easy as far as setting things up, but bluetooth connectivity with a sprint phone has been problematic. As this is my first linux install on the laptop, (and more multimedia than I've set up in the past), I was suprised how easy it's been going.

Real-Time Navigation with Google Earth

[kai.chan]

Instead of plotting Access Points, getting a GPS Receiver that feeds GPS location into Google Earth to make a real-time navigation system would be quite beneficial to the user. With streaming high-res maps and Google Earth's built-in route directions, I'm sure that a navigation system like this would be a good market. Especially if Google decides to release a Linux version of Google Earth to lower the cost of production of a non-Windows-based navigation system.

Re:You have a point.

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Once we can integrate a PC into the whole thing with voice activation, it will be awesome- Some cars have features like instant MPG and GPS/Nav- but these are expensive options. Imagine your head unit controlling your many song music collection all while monitoring your exhaust to see how your motor is running. Add some sex somehow and it is the geeky man trifecta- Cars, Computers and women.
Sure all these features may distract a driver, Except the remote start- My summer car and my wife's car are in the garage- so my truck sits out. Being able to start it and have it warm and have the ice defrosted when I go outside is great. If you live in the south or west, you can't imagine what it is like to get in a truck that has been sitting outside all night in below 0 weather... and then scraping the ice off it.

Nice

[interstellar_donkey]

I have something similier in my car; an older 600mhz dell laptop connected to a power inverter in the seat and a Garmin handheld GPS. I have an 802.11b Orinoco card with a 5dbi mag-mount antenna connected to a pigtail to the card, and another 803.11b/g card with internal antenna. This setup can do just about everything the setup in the article has, with the exception of the live TV (though I can stream mpg video over the wireless lan), the cell phone interface (I have Sprint... ugh), and my system is not connected to my car stereo (though, in a pinch, I can burn a CD-R with MP3s and throw it in the car player).

The main difference though, between his setup and mine is, mine looks like garbage. When it's setup the passenger seat has the laptop (making it unusable) and there are wires running everywhere. To me, that's what makes this guys setup so friggin' cool. When this guy goes out on a date, he doesn't have to spend 20 minutes packing everything up and storing it in the trunk (because, believe it or not, most girls are not impressed by a car full of lose computer equipment and wires running everywhere).

I think when someone gets around to making custom kits for various vehicles for mobile computer installation--that blend in with the interior of the car like this guy's setup does--they'll do pretty well. While I wouldn't really care for streaming video (how am I supposed to watch TV while I'm driving?), I would like to see systems that made it easy for the car computer to connect to your wireless network, and from your desktop computer copy whichever mp3s (or OGG or whatever) you felt like having in your car's library.

I could imagine going over to a friends house, and him asking me "Have you heard XYZ's new album?" "No.. any good?" "It's great. Here, I'll burn you a copy" "Don't bother. I noticed you don't have WEP running on your wireless, so my car has probably already negotiated a connection and is on your LAN." (clicks on 'my network', and my shared folder configured through samba shows up) "There it is. Just drag and drop the music files into there".

Again, this all could be done using existing technology. The only hurdles are getting the dang thing configured for what you want it to do, and getting it installed into your car so it looks nice.

Re:Scary.

[kd5ujz]

its pretty easy to hack together a car/garage door lock key fob "cracker". Just find one of the many user setable devices. If it is set with dipswitches, you can use a 4040 binary ripple counter (all of the ones I have are 12bit), and use a 555 as your clock/pulse for the ripple counter. Tie the outputs to the dipswith outputs, and let it run through the codes automaticly. Might take awhile, older ones were 8 bit, but some new ones are getting up there. If you need more than 12 bits, tie two together for 24 bit.

Re:OK, this might work

[Gordonjcp]

Not to speak of the fact if they really really really wanted your car... and I mean really... they could just use a tow truck.

Funny story about that. There was a guy who I used to work with had a Ford Sierra Cosworth, which he had spent an insane amount of money on taking it far beyond the normal Cossie spec. To secure it, he had various locks and pins, and electronic goodies, and then two bloody massive steel rings cast into his concrete driveway which he chained the front and rear subframes to with the kind of chains more generally used for mooring fishing boats.

One night while he was at home in bed, someone came up, *turned the car around* so it was nose-first up the drive, and left a note on the instrument panel saying "If we want it, we'll have it"...