My Car PC

Posted June 18, 2002

My Car PC By Shawn C. Teague

Dear X10,

I had one of my older PC's collecting dust in the closet. It is a P-200, 64 megs of RAM, small gig hard drive, old PCI VGA video card, sound card, etc. I was getting so sick of having music CD's getting all scratched and dented when they float around inside the car, so I thought of a cheap, yet clever way to make an MP3 car. All I needed to do was find a few components to make this application work, so off I went on a shopping spree. Well, it was harder than I thought. The LCD was the tricky part.

I first bought a few old laptops, took them apart and attemepted to configure the display to work with a normal PCI video card and an RGB out. After 22 hours and a lot of transistors and resistors, I got it to work. But, after adding 9 feet of ribbon cable, I found that the signal was not strong enough to hold the display at a viewable view.

So I went looking again and found a online company that sold LCD displays that would work with any NTSC Video Input. I then went to Ebay and picked up an ATI All in Wonder 64 PCI video card with TV outs. Bingo - it worked! So, off to Radio Shack I went to get 9 feet of composite cable (Video RCA). The display was already 12v DC so the power supply for the LCD was solved. I then went out to Zellers and bought a black picture frame, as the LCD comes without a housing. I bet you didn't know it was a picture frame around the LCD! Once again, it's cheap and works great!

Now to power up the PC. Since I wanted to keep this as cheap as I could, I didn't want to buy a 12v DC computer power supply for $159.00 USD, so I went to Radio Shack again and picked up a 12v DC to 120 volt Jensen power inverter. I then had two 120 volt plugs right in the trunk.

OK, here's the really cool part - the mouse. I found a local computer company a few towns over that sold this X10 Mouse Remote. After drilling the salesman with a million questions on how it worked and whether it's infrared or radio frequency (etc. etc.) he had sold me on it. It is perfect for any app like this. I just plugged it into the PC and, batta bing batta boom! Windows 98 SE found it right away and the driver disk and the Remote Utilities program installed with ease.

Now the sound. I knew that the sound card was already installed on that old computer, so I just needed to get the signal to the Pioneer CD player in the car dash. With the help of a 8mm to RCA 6 foot extention, I found a Clarion radio frequency modulator at a local car stereo shop. This unit is used for CD changers to send the signal to a car radio if the radio does not have a Aux input. I set the radio to 88.7 FM and, bingo, the sound is sweet and cystal clear. But, don't forget to add a ground wire from the PC shell to the frame of the car. It will get rid of any interferance from the car's electrical system.

This is a fun project that I wanted to try. It worked great and I'm continuing to make it work even better.

Thanks again to X10 for this Remote Mouse. I must add that I did go back to that computer store and bought every X10 remote they had.

Keep up the great work!

Sincerely,
Shawn C. Teague
(visit Shawn's website for more info)
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