Im thinking of doing this considering HU's these days dont have large storage space for music..upwards towards 150-200g....I was curious if anyone on these forums is running a carputer....

Ive been to mp3car.com and they arent very active....

steve meade has one... well chicken has one....

I used to have this problem and i don't really know what you're overall goals are, but for me, I opted to just go with the alpine route and I pretty much run everything off of my iPod. 160GB and it works perfect for me with playlists and everything.

Now obviously carputer's can do much much more then just an iPod and you can add DVD and everything like that to it.

But maybe the iPod choice or I think some Clarion devices have a USB input you can hook an external hard drive up to and use that to surf through the folders. Maybe something along those lines?

I had one fore about a year and a half. I just switched it out.

I kept looking for a head unit with a large hard drive, but they don't exist. I finally realized the solution is what everyone has. A head unit with a ipod attached. Works perfectly.

Problem with a carputer is the startup time. I had mine down to about 30 seconds, but for little trips around town I would never turn it on, so I never had my music playing. More trouble than it was worth, but it was a fun project.

John Carr of Team Audio Pipe, had 1 in his Punisher Van.

it was a Tower he took apart and mounted it to a foam cushin off a couch...

got a Mini board with a glide pad mouse, and Bammmmm 1 carputer

he was running an inverter to a power supply for the setup.

mounted a big flat screen in the dash

ill find pics of the puter later

I used to have this problem and i don't really know what you're overall goals are, but for me, I opted to just go with the alpine route and I pretty much run everything off of my iPod. 160GB and it works perfect for me with playlists and everything.

Now obviously carputer's can do much much more then just an iPod and you can add DVD and everything like that to it.

But maybe the iPod choice or I think some Clarion devices have a USB input you can hook an external hard drive up to and use that to surf through the folders. Maybe something along those lines?

i guess ill probably just have to go this route. I didnt really feel like getting another ipod and having to copying all my pucking music over, but i guess it will be the cheapest and easiest way to do things....fack

This site has some great stuff for carputers if you are still interested: http://www.mini-box.com/site/index.html. They have some car pc cases that are really small that work with the mini-itx motherboards.

I have one in my 95 Cougar. I'm redoing the dash bezel right now, ill try to remember to take a couple new pictures of it.

There's an old one.

I have an 8" touch screen from here: http://www.short-circuit.com/

It's running an M2-atx power supply (has the startup/shutdown controller builtin), 1 gig ram, 120 gig sata laptop hd, can't remember the board, the board's a VIA CN13000 1.3ghz c7 mini-itx, and I have a soundblaster value card in it.

I have it running through a kenwood excelon 591, but I may lose that and go to pc controlled EQ crossover after I investigate it some more since my soundcard supposedly does it.

I personally don't like apple as a company and am not much of an ipod fan because of that, so my other car will probably end up with a zune, but there's a tiny chance i'll do a pc in that too.

Oh ya, the heater controls are in the center console (some people actually have those controlled with their pcs...crazy)

Edited June 11, 200817 yr by jbob