The Hardware:
* 2005 Mazda 3s with Sports package - I LOVE this car.
* Via Epia M10000 Mini-ITX $160 - I love the small form factor of this board. Getting everything working in Gentoo was a b**ch.
* M1-ATX 90 Watt $74.99 - Smart Automotive Power Supply - DC-DC power supply which uses an ignition signal wire to trigger acpi signals to the mainboard. Result is a clean shutdown every time, and it never gets confused about whether the PC should be on or off. There is even built in power monitoring so if the Battery dips below 11 volts, the PS kills all power to the mainboad.
* 80GB Laptop Hard Drive $169.99 - Laptop drives are more durable, and can handle the road better than an full size drive.
* 512MB Low profile RAM $95.00 - The case I chose required low profile ram.
* VoomPC Enclosure free - New case was provided by Mini-box.com. Check it out.
* Slim CDROM $15.00 - Needed slim form factor for case. - Not used anymore - new case does not allow for cdrom.
* Casetronic C158 Mini-ITX Case $145.00 - This was the first case I bought, I no longer use it. This case is perfect. It fits right under the passenger seat, and can take a full height pci card. Since the power supply hooks to the power switch pins, I hooked the power button to the reset pins. This way if I need to, I can reach behind the seat and hit the reset.
* Lilliput 7" VGA Touchscreen 619GL-70NP $251 - Now that MythTV has mouse support, I can take advantage of a great touchscreen.
* Clarion VMA5894 $150 - Listed only because this is what I started with. I no longer use this screen. 5.8" Widescreen TFT LCD. The Via Mainboard has onboard TV-out, which feeds straight to the LCD display.
* Gyration Cordless Optical Air Mouse and Compact Keyboard (RF Mouse/Keyboard) $129.99 - These are more of a backup than primary input. The mouse and keyboard are supr compact (keyboard fits in my glove box. And the mouse can be turned off so the batteries last a long time. The best part is they are both RF, so I don't have to point at anything.
* BU-353 Weather-proof GPS Receiver $75 - USB GPS device that has drivers built into any modern linux kernel. This creates a serial port, which I can attach to with my GPS software. I can also use the GPS device to plot wireless access points while I drive >
* TripNav USB GPS Receiver TN-200 ~$100 I think - This is the first GPS dongle I bought. There was nothing wrong with it, but one day it just stopped working. I disected it, and found a small "watch" battery soldered inside. I suspect the battery died, but don't know for sure.
* D-Link DBT-120 Bluetooth $39.99 - This is by FAR the coolest part of my CarPC. I have a Motorola e815 with Verizon. Verizon cripples the Bluetooth functionality of their phones, but with some simple hacks you can uncripple them. The nice thing about the e815 is that it connects to Verizon's new evdo network, which talks at 400-700kbps. I average 600kbps but ymmv. So with the bluetooth device, I can get in my car, and without even taking the phone out of my packet, get a broadband internet connection. Further down, you can read about how I am using it to stream Live TV from my house
* D-Link DWL-AG530 802.11a/g Dualband Wireless PCI card $61.00 - I started this project with a crappy linksys wireless pci card, but the thing had a fixed antenna, and since the PC is under the passenger seat I was getting crap for signal strength. I had to search far and wide (ok, a few google searches) for an 1) 802.11G 2) PCI card 3) with an Atheros chipset, 4) and an external antenna. The answer was the DWL-AG530. The only problem was something about the firmware country code, which I had to follow this hack to fix. Now I get great signal strength, and can remote start my car from my house, and start ssh'ing, and file transferring without going outside!. My next step will be an rsync script to automatically copy new content to the car at boot time.
* Custom made control pad ~$90 for parts - This was the Biggest pain in building this PC. The interface I chose is MythTV. This was mainly because the project is so mature, and is so easy to customize with themes and xml files. BUT MythTV does not really support a mouse, so a touch screen is kinda out of the question unless I want to make some significant code changes. Initially I worked around this with an ATI RF remote. But that was bulky, and didn't have the polished feel I was going for. In the end, I decided to cut apart the plastic near the shifter, and solder/hot glue/bondo together the rocker from a gamepad, and the number pad from a remote control. Basically I soldered the buttons to a $20 USB keyboard so if I press UP on the gamepad rocker, it registers as the UP arrow key from a keyboard. Mapping all these keys to the proper solder points was a VERY time consuming process, but worth it in the end. I had to surface mount solder all the points, which made me nervous about wires popping off, so I used 2 part epoxy to hold them all in place when I was done.
* ElmScan 5 USB Scan Tool free - This was very generously supplied by G-NET Car PC (show them some love). I have hooked this up using my laptop and some windows software, but need to tinker some more to use it in Linux.
The entire thing here:https://www.timekiller.org/carpc/index.php