No time to play...

Ever since I have moved back to school I have been so busy. I am very active in our ACM group on my campus and that has been keeping me busy with a few meetings. I am also part of a evolutionary computation group and we are in the process of rebuilding our 20 node dual processor cluster.

The car computer has been sitting on my desk this whole time. I have not ever had a chance to try and boot it up let alone reinstall windows and get this awesome bluetooth mic working. Right now I have just been using it on Google Talk . Hopefully things will slow down soon.

On my free time I have been trying to check out other people's carpcs since I cannot work on mine. I have seen some really nice work. Keep up the good work and I hope to be back in the game soon.

Start Up

Lately my car has been grumpy when starting after it has been sitting for a while. This has been happening for a few months now and nothing I have tried has corrected the problem. I have been making sure I have changed the air filter and ran fuel injector cleaner through it often. Nothing has had any effect. On Sunday I installed new spark plugs hoping that might do it and for a while it seemed to have helped. Well, today it didn't want to start right up again. Guess I will have to keep trying things or take it in. I also found a few minutes to work on another project before heading back off to school. More pictures and details on this will be posted in the next few days once I take some pictures.

Vacation and Moving

I will be on vacation for a few days then moving back to Peoria, IL where I go to college. I am not sure if I will have the time or any topics to post on over these next few days. Hopefully once school gets going things will pic up again.

Case

While the computer case has been sitting in my house I decided to give you more details on its construction. I started out with a thin piece of plywood I found in the garage. I placed the motherboard on top of the board where I wanted it to be. I then took a thin finishing nail and a hammer and tapped marks into the board where the screw holes were. Next I drilled out the holes, added a touch of wood glue, and screwed in the motherboard screws that come with any standard case. That left me with this.


I then cut 3 pieces of 1x1 lumber for the 3 corners. This will hold the top on. You can see 2 of them in place in the picture above. Next I needed somewhere to place the hard drive.

I attached 2 of the 3.5 to 5.25 adapters on each side of the drive. I then screwed it into the bottom and the pole sticking up. It worked rather well.

Since I had it all apart I decided it looked a bit bad in the car since I cleaned everything else all up. I decided to paint it black to match my Sub box. I picked up a can of flat black spray paint.

Here it is with its top on with a fresh coat of paint.





With the motherboard installed:




And everything back together!

If you look on the right side there in a chunk out of the side board. This will be the slot that the trunk lid hinge can pass through when using the trunk. Before there was no board here. I added it to protect the computer from any rain if had to open the trunk. Before the it was in the back of the trunk so it didn't matter.

Overall it was extremely easy to build. If you want any more advise or have any questions feel free to ask!

Not my week

I got up on this wonderful Saturday morning all ready to reinstall windows on my carpc. My first step is to grab the extra CD-Rom I hook up to it only when I need it. Ok, its in my spare parts box. Wait... I moved my computers and all my other electronic stuff back to school last weekend except for my laptop. That means no extra CD-Rom lying around which means no windows re-install untill I go back to school. On the bright side, I have started doing a bit of work to the case. Updates on that will be psted soon.

Still at it

Well, after a few days I have yet to get it to work. Still looking for any advice from anyone anywhere... My next step will be to reinstall windows when ever I can find a long enough stretch of free time to do it in. Any help??

Arg!

Well, I can't get this Headset to work on my carpc. I was gone for the weekend but first thing after work today I brought the PC inside and plugged it in to a monitor and ethernet. No more remote desktop problems :D Well, Now i cannot get it to detect the microphone. It detects the device but will not act as a microphone. Works great on my laptop though. One thing I thought was weird, under the Services tab there are none listed on neither my laptop nor the carpc. Any bluetooth experts out there care to give me any advice?