Luke
Dork
10/2/08 4:39 a.m.
My link to the original thread, translated from German, isn't working, but you can see all the pictures here: http://racergeeks.com/showthread.php?t=975
Prerequisites for buying this car:
Knowledge in electronics
Knowledge of PC technology
Skills in programming (especially Visual Basic)
Knowledge of micro controller
I did a unit on Visual Basic last semester. I think, that with my sketchy understanding of programming, I could reduce this thing from a fully operational sports car, to a static lump of metal in no time at all 
Now cue Windows error message jokes.
Wow that's like what I've always wanted to do! Except the Windows/VB part.
http://www.mp3car.com/ This website and their forum will help you build any kind of car pc you want. It's amazing at some of the things people do.
On the topic, I am currently looking for the thread, but some redneck on LS1tech fabbed up a car PC, but stuck a huge tower desktop in the spare trunk well of a 4th gen f-body. Put a 7 inch monitor in the radio spot and had a trackball mouse in the center console to operate. Redneck or grassroots, either way it was funny but it worked.
The idea of putting a hard drive in a car is a bit scary, but with the rapid decrease in price of thumb drives makes a "no moving parts" computers a bit easier. Using SD cards is also an option, there are adapters to make the computer think they are and IDE drive.
SSDD in whatever form is great. That or use a laptop that has a shock sensor built in to protect the disk drive.
There are 32Gb compact flash drives available for ~$100 and you can get adapters to plug them right into an IDE cable.
Yes, I know. Those are essentially the same as a Solid State Disk Drive. Their lifespan is limited as they degrade overtime as data is written and rewritten. Much like a CD-RW can only be used a few times, flash drives don't last forever. SSDD drives have built-in intelligence to pay attention to what areas have been written on and to spread the load around to minimize the first few banks going bad.
or you can just do what i did, buy a head unit with dvd playback, 3.5inch screen, navigation, and a 40 gig hard drive built in with shock absorbing sensing nonsense. I might build a car pc for my next car depending if it is brand new or not.
