150 replies to this topic

[Jammy]

Nice!

If your planning on having a very small 2200Mhz pc and still have it vey small will there not be cooling problems?!

[Podcake]

nice toy mate ( i need to get some internal ones of mine)

mini ITX i presume?

how much did it cost you?

mine u see was made on a budget and to be SOLID, so its fairly big

PoD

[Podcake]

lol u posted as i did

erm, yes and no, i have plans of how to cool it adequately, simply all the air thru the system will go accross the chip and straight out again to try and keep it cool

PoD

[ed4ran]

Not quite Mini ITX, its a small Flex ATX (only a few cm bigger than Mini ITX),

currently
800mhz (max is 1.3ghz)
512mb Ram (upto 1GB),
20gb HDD
mini 200w PSU that runs off 12v

Usual ports, USB, Firewire, TV out, Lan etc.

Mother board is a Shuttle FV24

[philster]

I've had all the bits to do this for yonks and have finally got round to ordering a keypad off ebay to control it all, got some really good software off the net aswell called 'media engine' which has all sorts of user friendly options and was designed for in car use.

The spec is a 400mhz celeron and does all i need really it can play mp3 as well as movie files and also things like autoroute, its not much slower than my home pc on boot up either and could be sped up by disabling a few things not used.

I've been looking at the epia boards but to be honest changed my mind as i won't really gain much from them apart from a small reduction in size.

This is a pic of the setup i'm gonna use although the hardrive will probably be replaced with a smaller laptop one (2.5") which should also be a bit better for coping with bumps.

[Podcake]

looks like ive started a bit of an interest here

well let me know how fast yours boots ( ive gotten mine to under 60seconds- which isnt bad for a 400 Mhz AMD K6-2 thats booting win XP pro )

anyhow, the next one will boot fast ( wont match my desktop tho- got a bit of a beast of a desktop )

[ed4ran]

Mine boots to login at about 35 secs (that was me counting though so it will probly be slower)

[philster]

mine takes a while, timed it before takes about 80 seconds! That said its only got 64ram till i get some back off my mate (his died and he borrowed my 2 slots of 128). Also the hardrive that i've used is on its last legs but will replace with a 7200rpm 80gig as they are only about £30 (gone off the idea of a laptop one too slow!) so that should speed things up a bit, also there are certain things you can disable which should help it boot faster, its just a shame nobody does any decent dos based software as that would be miles quicker.

The only other problem i've got is a power supply, i don't want to use an invertor (already running one for the ps2) and the 12v ones aren't made for this board so i'll probably have to butcher one to make it fit.

What o/s are you all running? i'm using xp at the mo (hence the slow bootup with only 64ram!) although i have got 95/98 and Me but they don't tend to be as reliable.

[philster]

Had a bit of spare time today so i thought i'd have a crack at it again, was going to buy a plastic enclosure from maplin but they didn't have any big enough, i thought about cutting down the original case but it is quite heavy and would be a lot of work.

So then i had a brainwave



have you guessed what it is yet?



yup a ps2 or pc2 as i've now nicknamed it.

Had a look at 12v power supplies as well today and i can get one for £30 so with the hardrive and key pad it'll come to £70 to finish things off, just need to make some holes in the side for the cables to go in and i'll be able to finish it.
The only thing i'm a bit worried about is the sound quality, had a look on a few forums and a lot of people don't use the onboard sound, only problem is i can only use the onboard sound as there are no pci slots on the board eeek!

[minimanshane]

Fluppin class!!!!
Were could i pic up a cheap computer also could you actually run the computer as in applications?

[philster]

Fluppin class!!!!
Were could i pic up a cheap computer also could you actually run the computer as in applications?

I'm intending to use it mainly for mp3, but will also be running stuff like autoroute, it may also come in handy for uploading pictures from my digital camera etc.

You could use it for anything although you couldn't run any good games on it really as it isnt powerful enough but thats not an issue because i've got the ps2.

You can also get gps modules which plug into the usb which could be useful (especially for spotting speedtraps etc.)

As for picking up cheap pc's try the computer markets, you can get a base spec 400mhz ready to go for as little as £30, then you'd obvioulsy need to get the necessary power supply etc to use it and also a reasonable size tft (i'm running a 7") oh and don't forget it needs to have a tv-out.

[minimanshane]

would this do the job ? http://cgi.ebay.co.u...5220090815&rd=1

[philster]

yeah it would but i would imagine the motherboard would be quite large so there may be a space issue.

You'd also need to buy a pci graphics card (from what it says it aint got agp) with tv-out so that you can link it to a tft screen, or you could try and get a screen whcih can work as a monitor thus using the normal input.

[CharlieBrown]

This topic is really interesting.

How exactly does the computer connect to the speakers? Thorough a head unit?

[mattvallins]

I think Podcake is using a line in on the car stereo, yeah. Well, at the moment he is using a cassette adaptor, for plugging a portable CD player into a tape player in a car :fear:
Simple!