Cases and Components.
If you’re re-using an existing PC then you’re pretty much stuck when it comes to the components you’re going to use. Another reason why re-using a PC is a bad idea.
The problem is that traditional PC cases aren’t well suited to being mounted in a confined space like a foot well or in a boot. Even finding a permanent home for a laptop is going to be tricky. And actually attaching your PC is going to be difficult; PC cases don’t generally come with anchor points attached.
You’re much better off using a purpose built case that’s designed to be mounted and used in a moving vehicle. Something like the VoomPC case:
This case is designed entirely with vehicle PC’s in mind. It has feet with mounting holes to allow the PC to be fixed to pretty much any flat surface in your car. It also has front facing USB and audio-out connectors to allow for easy connectivity.
What’s more, the M2-ATX board shown on the last page will fit snugly inside this case, as will any Mini-ITX motherboard.
Mini what?
Mini-ITX is a standard of PC motherboard designed for situations where space is at a premium. All Mini-ITX motherboards are 17cm x 17cm making them ideal candidates for vehicle PC’s.
Because most people buy Mini-ITX boards for situations like this, most of them feature low-power, integrated processors like the Intel Atom or Nvidia Tegra processor. This is ideal for a Carputer as they’re powerful enough to run a full operating system like Windows 7, without the drain on your battery that a full PC would give.
What’s more, some Mini-ITX boards from the likes of Zotac come with a decent integrated graphics card, like the Nvidia ION chipset, which allows you to do more interesting things with your Carputer like play 3D games.
Disk Drives.
First off, I would strongly advise against using a CD or DVD drive in your Carputer. All it would take is one pothole and you could wreck your disk and the drive itself. Optical drives aren’t designed to be moved around while in use, even laptop style drives can quite easily lose their grip on the disk while it’s spinning which can cause a lot of damage and annoyance.
Your best bet is to put all of your audio and video data on some form of hard disk. But, what’s the best way to go?
First of all, you’re going to want to use a laptop style hard disk in your Carputer. These are less likely to get damaged by movement or impact (though they’re still pretty fragile to be honest). Using a normal desktop hard disk is simply not practical; they use a lot more power than a laptop style disk and are also a lot more vulnerable to shock, vibration and impact. Use a desktop hard disk in your Carputer and you’re asking for trouble.
Even better would be to use a Solid State Disk (SSD). These contain no moving parts so are more or less invulnerable to the types of vibration and shock that would quickly destroy a normal hard disk. The problem is, they’re very expensive. Even a modest 32GB SSD is going to cost you around £50, and the prices get crazier as the capacity of the drive increases.
You have to find the balance between price and storage space, and at the moment that’s probably going to mean that you use a traditional laptop hard disk. Though, with SSD prices dropping all the time it may soon be within your price range to use one of these instead.