ITX / Mini-ITX Form Factor PC's

[L00ker]

So part of the car project I am working on includes stand alon engine management I am thinking that given the amount of room I will have in the center console it might be worthwhile to build a mini-itx PC based system and have it serve as both my stereo as well as various other media on top of having my stand alone engine mangement onboard (as opposed to having to hook into it via some sort of serial cable) and am looking to see how many people have used it and how usable it is as a desktop setup to run a light copy of windows xp for playing various media with 1gb (possibly 2) of RAM... Thoughts?

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: L00ker
So part of the car project I am working on includes stand alon engine management I am thinking that given the amount of room I will have in the center console it might be worthwhile to build a mini-itx PC based system and have it serve as both my stereo as well as various other media on top of having my stand alone engine mangement onboard (as opposed to having to hook into it via some sort of serial cable) and am looking to see how many people have used it and how usable it is as a desktop setup to run a light copy of windows xp for playing various media with 1gb (possibly 2) of RAM... Thoughts?

"Not a bad way to spend ten thousand dollars ..." :P

- M4H

[L00ker]

10g's? Hardly you can get a Pentim M 750 based setup with a gb of memory with everything except a HDD for like $750 throw in a 7200 rpm laptop drive and you actually have a pretty quick system thats smaller than the average shoebox...

[amish]

http://www.mp3car.com/ is a good place to start gathering info. i wanted to do something like that too. i wanted to have audio, dvds, nav and engine management in one nice package. it looked to be too expensive for me

[cheesehead]

I would just get an old laptop. Xubuntu runs beautifully - and is more than adequate for MP3 playing or OBD2 monitoring.

Often, old laptops on eBay with a 400-500mhz Celeron can be had for $50 or so, though this would be without a hard drive, battery, or power supply.

However, you would'nt want these anyway - you'll want a car power adapter, your car's battery will let you power the laptop for well over a week straight, and using a USB hard drive enclosure, you can attach a cheap desktop-sized 300GB hard drive for your 'tunes.

[L00ker]

Well thats what I started out with was an older laptop a compaq m300 while a great (and TINY) laptop I decided it would be cool to have a carputer so I am going to go for a full itx setup with a Pentium M 1.7GHz/1GB DDR setup with a touchscreen but I am just curious how well they work out for people, and there is not going to be any OBD2 (or other "OBD" style system) as it is going to be running a full stand alone engine management system (megasquirt)