StevieG's Car PC Blog

Last year around April, I completely finished my Car PC. Well – finished in as far as it actually did the things I wanted it to do, and worked reliably.

A few things happened though after getting married in June 2005 that made me lose interest in the Car PC and it"s "scene" – my wife went back to college, which means I now have to catch the train while she has the car, and I got a lot busier at work too, meaning I was far too tired in the evenings to be interested in computers! Then after months of the car PC just "working", the GPS device broke, and I didn"t want to buy another.

So in October I ripped out the Car PC – it took 15 minutes to remove the motherboard, and screen, and replace it with the original stereo – leaving the rest of the Car PC in, but inactive waiting for when I got my interest back.

Over Christmas the Car PC hardware has been hard at work, encoding DVDs, playing music etc sitting undert the telly as the home media centre. It"s just not right!

Well – it"s about time the day came that the car PC went back where it belongs, and the Car PC is being re-setup. Nothing is changing with the hardware (apart from moving to 2.5" HDDs that I"ve aquired since) but the software will be changing.

This time round, now the hardware is done, all the software will be custom written. Why, when there are so many car PC front ends around? Well, the longer the system was in, the less I felt It was "mine". The hardware itself (motherboard, hdd, psu, amp, screen) is built by manufacturers, the screen housing was built by Car Tech, the software was written by someone else too. The main parts that I had actually done myself were the woodwork and wiring, and "in the middle" software for my custom buttons, sensors etc.

I"m hoping to have the system back in before the next Car PC meet

After March, I moved my blog over to Dashboard Monkey. Unfortunately this proved to be a bad idea, as the pages have went missing somehow.

So – my blog from March until the end of 2005 is now missing, but wasn"t a massive loss, as since the Car PC was installed, I hadn"t done much to it.

The main event in Car PCs was the Car PC show in April which you might want to take a look at. I got married in June and after about September I lost interest temporarily as things were getting quite hectic at work!

Hopefully 2006 will be a better year for the Car PC!