Hi Helpful people... My brother is starting to build a panel van, and because I am more into electronics than he is, he wants me to make him some gadgets for his car. The Idea we discussed goes as follows:
The whole system is controlled by a normal computer, being displayed by a colour touch screen (expensive if anyone knows of a cheap source), running on either Linux or Windows. From there he can do anything, such as control the aircon, windows, lock doors and play MP3s. It needs to tell him the time, and temperature. He also wants park distance control (both beeping and actual distance!) and a LCD on the back fin to display messages to the cars behind. He also expects me to put in a radio, and a TELEVISION RECEIVER. I think he is expecting too much, but if I can actually pull this off, we'll have one really cool car... If anyone has any ideas, previous experience... please, please help... :!:

 

Sorry, I also forgot to ask what system anyone recomends for controlling the touch screen and the lcd on the fin. My worries are what is going to cost more? The electronics or the actual car...

 

hello! i am starting a project which may relate to your massive task! i am making a wireless park distance control (primarily for use on trailers) but have been finding trouble finding suitable ultrasonic emiters and detectors, so if u find something which works well then if u would let me know it would be greatly appreciated, cheers

ps. I have a post under parts requested, title - ultrasonic, if u wanna have a look!

thanks loads
dave

 

My younger brother had me look into a similiar project some months ago when he discovered my laptop doubles up as part of my home sound system , and holds far more albums than his shiny and very expensive new cd changer.
A rough guide is 30 to 40 Mbyte for between 17 - 24 tracks , throw in a 5Gb hard drive or 700Mb for a cdrw and you can see the attraction!

I looked at using a second hand laptop for my lil bro's car, ebay is full of them, as for the touch screen overlays , they aint cheap and a car installation will require a minature lcd as well,again more expense, unless you got room to relocate the laptops original display.

The best solution we came up with was to use a small lcd tv module
(don't forget u need to convert RGB from computer to composite video) with fixed "push-buttons" on each side of the display.

As for the other goodies, if the comps got a USB port then a tv tuner is straightforward , usb radio tuners are a bit scarce.
After that it's just a case getting your software to talk to a bunch of I/O ports multiplexed from the USB or through the parallel port.


Save the serial port for connecting to vehicles on board diagnostics OBD-2
if your vehicle has one , see ELM electronics of canada

 

I'd suggest going with a Mini-ITX PC for that setup. Use high-brightness LEDs for the fin - LCD will be really hard for others to read. You can get reasonably priced touchscreens if you look hard enough. I got my "OEM" one from http://www.touchwindow.com and screens are available from various sources... Ebay or Taiwan or where-ever... TV and so can be PCI cards, but make sure you get a case that can handle riser cards. OS could be Linux, with a sane window manager like Matchbox. Not sure about interconnets, but probably some sort of serial link is easiest.

 

Just a suggesstion: Use microcontroller with CAN to controll all the electronics controll of your car. Then use CANoe software for switches simulation. In that way, you can control all electronics functions through your PC.

 

I would also go with mini-iTX boards. They are small, cheap and powerful. Just make sure you either hide/conseal most of the expensive electronics or build/buy a really good anti-theft system

As for the control, the easiest way is to use the parallel port. It has an 8-bit output which you can expand with multiplexers (if needed).

 

PC CANbus controllers seem expensive (at least the ones I've seen anyway) but CANbus enabled MCUs aren't, so maybe PC->Serial/Parallel Port->MCU->CANBus would work ok? Might be interesting producing suitable code for the MCU, but it's a pretty good setup for inside a car. If it's late-model and uses Bosch gear, you could probably download the specs and use the PC to display realtime info from all over the car.