29 May 2006
Written by
Yours Truly (
)
Published on May 29th, 2006 @ 02:51:35 pm, using 469 words, 7306 views
After much research and building comparison lists of pros and cons, I've finally made my selection. The chassis that will house the Acura ITX carputer is the Akiwa GHB-B05 from Guanghsing Industrial. I purchased the case with a 200W 1U PSU (mine was shipped with a 200W Sparkle Power PSU), which was handy for benchtesting the system rather than running it from my spare automotive battery, which required recharging every other day or so.
The chassis is very compact (measuring 11x11x3), and has room for 3 laptop hard drives and a slimline CD-ROM drive. It has front-mounted USB ports (which won't be used in this application, so the wiring for those ports was removed and stored), a large top vent, and an exhaust fan in the front-side of the case. The case has two rear PCI expansion slots (though only one is usable for PCI cards, the other for a USB or serial backplate connector), and ships with a PCI riser card...
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18 May 2006
Written by
Yours Truly (
)
Published on May 18th, 2006 @ 06:40:28 pm, using 624 words, 13091 views
If you missed the first two parts of this story, you can read all of the details here:
Fabricating the Dashboard Chassis, Pt 1
Fabricating the Dashboard Chassis, Pt 2
The next stage of the Acura car computer fabrication process involved cutting a sheet of plexiglass to function as a stand-off layer between the metal headunit chassis and the burlwood ABS trim which will be visible to the outside...
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01 May 2006
Written by
Yours Truly (
)
Published on May 1st, 2006 @ 08:20:37 pm, using 481 words, 5984 views
It was a very productive weekend for the Acura ITX carPC project. At the end of the day, the dashboard chassis is complete, and the only thing that remains is the faceplate mounting bracket and its related parts.
If you missed Part 1, you can read it here:
Fabricating the Dashboard Chassis, Pt 1
Picking up where we left off, the various cutouts have been made in the chassis which allow it to mount very snugly into the existing mounting bracket that is part of the dashboard in the Acura CL.
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26 April 2006
Written by
Yours Truly (
)
Published on April 26th, 2006 @ 10:29:26 pm, using 344 words, 7876 views
Since I don't yet have any welding ability, I drew a to-scale design schematic and brought it to a local fabricator shop. I supplied them with the outer shell of an old and rather heavy-duty computer case (thanks Alan) from which to cut the necessary metal. The steel was of a sufficiently heavy gauge, and the resulting chassis is fairly stiff. Once in the car, it will be held in place by at least one bolt on each side, two bolts in the front, and a series of L-brackets along the top-rear. That should hold it in rather tightly.
A test-mounting of the Alpine headunit and the MTSVO-SC touchscreen proved a precise and tight fit. Were it not for the vibration in a car computer / mobile computing environment, the two units could reasonably be mounted inside it without screws.
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