The Car-Computer
Currently: Fine Tuning

The first step was taking some measurements of the celica and making sure that my idea would work. Taking some pictures of taking the measurements, that allowed me to huridly photoshop a mockup of how I wanted it to look when it was finished. This photoshop mockup is a little off, as the various components are actually bigger in the mockup than they ended up being IRL. Also, we ended up painting the screen cover black and fiberglassing it in smooth with the rest of the dashboard.

The next step was to decide on a screen/touchscreen. Of course I went touchscreen, because it's a billion times cooler. :) For brand, I went with a Xenarc 700TSV. Xenarc is a little known LCD company that makes great products. The touchscreen was within my price range, but not cheap. http://www.onehitwonders.com/ sells them for $430 with free shipping. I'll get a real pict of it up here soon.

And then you have to figure out what kind of PC you want to run the system. Me? Screw that, I don't want a PC in my car. I wanted a mac. But I had to find a nice, cheap one. Eventually, my friend Eric came to my rescue with his old, beat up and "broken" Powerbook G4 550 Mhz. It was broken because the screen didn't work anymore, but for carputer purposes, that was perfect since you remove the screen anyway to save power and heat. You place a magnet on the touchpad so the computer things the lid is closed- and doesn't waste processing power on the screen that isn't there.

The powerbook didn't come with bluetooth however, and I quickly bought a bluetooth adapter so I could use a wireless keyboard with it. I finally decided on apple's own wireless keyboard- as everything else was huge and bulky. When not using the touchscreen (people in the backseat) handicapped access is turned on n the computer, and the keypad serves as a mouse! Very cool, very convenient.

The point of the computer was to have a billion mp3s at my beck and call; (25 GBs of them are stored on an external the powerbook is hooked up to), and therefore I have to have some way of getting sound out of the powerbook and to the Alpine head unit. I could just take a headphone jack to RCA splitter like I use on my tower at home, but I found I got slightly better sound quality from a USB Soundblaster Mp3+; which I got for free (I wouldn't have PAID for it lol). Also included is a microphone in jack- which I dont use right now.. and might, or might not. Might just buy a bluetooth microphone and use it for voice commands, mounting it to the side of the headrest.

Work Begins

Removal of.. everything. The stock amp had to go- it was blocking the new location of the headunit. You can't see where it was in this picture- but in later pictures, it was mounted to the same bolt points that the new head unit mounts are bolted to.

With the head unit mounted, and the trim mounted, you can see where we erred :/ sinks in too much on the passenger side. Also, a couple rough dremels on the shifter trim- but we're going to fiberglass a new one shortly with SNES controller plugs in it.

Here's one of the relocated switches. This switch now controls BOTH back quarter windows- we spliced the two switches together. The convertible top switch is on the other side, and required trimming to fit.

The main trim plate itself required dremeling off of 2 screw holes that stuck out past the bottom- these screw holes of course stuck into the head unit. Now it's less secure, but we're fixing that with the fiberglass.

With all the trim plates back on, tilt still not corrected.

Xenarc arrived, and I went to home depot to gather the parts needed to mount the powerbook into the car, as well as the parts needed to get the computer's audio to the head unit. As well as the power inverter to power the various components. We picked a Vector 400W one for the job, shown.

While I was working on mounting the powerbook to the bottom of the drivers seat, my friend Eric installed the Inverter in between the footwells of the seats.

Can you say GHETTO? :) Electrical tape is there to cushion the pb from the sharp edges of the metal (who needs sandpaper when you have tape?!) and the zip ties are there to hold the powerbook from bumping around. All hail zipties.

Wires wires everywhere! As you can see in the last pict, it got cleaned up substantially. Thats my external harddrive covered with neon green tape... Hey, it USED to be pink.

Bootup screen, and VLC playing an episode of Naruto to the right. My custom bootup screen features Ayumi Hamasaki :) But for a better cardomain car with Ayumi featured, go here to Ryan's Celica

Demonstration of the glare from a camera flash (you can kinda see the desktop tho) and the SNES in action! Fzero! woo woo! Fzero pict looks like a photochop, cus the original was really bad quality so I tried to fix it up in photoshop to make the screen clearer.