12-volt Plexiglass Computer 211
zootjeff writes: "I am in the process of designing and redesigning a computer for my car. This machine is based on the Shuttle FV24 motherboard. I built a box that is 8 inches by 7.5 inches by 3 inches. I also designed and built my own custom power supply. This could be useful to people who want to take linux into their car. It is also useful for solar powered battery operations." He sent some pictures, too, of what the 2nd case looks like, an
overview, including (!) police report number (the 2nd revision was stolen), more on
the power supply,
and the third iteration.
Art and Engineering (Score:3, Interesting)
Conceptual Art like this is a fine way of improving the drudgery of the commute, where millions in their identikit Fords and Fiestas wander soulessly to and fro' employment in cubicles, some of us are free, free to make our wild imaginations reality.
Is playing with an in car computer really the same tho? I'm all a-quiver at the talents of these techy types, but what actual difference does this in car computer make? None, really, it won't inflame the mind or create beauty, and this is the problem with modern tinkering. 1950's mobiles had flaming jet burners on the back, and we are adding little bits of silicon? Yuk.
Thankfully, when I moved to America I noticed that there is an even bigger car scene, and I would go to my local car improvement rally were it not for all the guns held by the police and contestants at such events, quite barbarous, in many respects.
I urge the modifiers of the utilitarian not to invent even more utility, but to improve and create an original aesthetic. Art is what is missing from our lives, in the modern age, not linux computers.
Beneficial... (Score:2, Interesting)
If I actually owned CDs made in the past four years, I might just get a CD player for my car. But with Napster, Gnutella, and now kza (a Kazaa client for Linux), I've stopped buying MP3s. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this idea had a ton of benefits:
Skip-proof - RAM's pretty cheap... Take a cheap computer and throw a gig of RAM in, and set a lot of it up as a ramdisk. Go over a bump with a CD, and you'll start skipping. (A hard drive would probably be worse...) But if your next ten songs, and the apps the system's using are all in RAM, unless the RAM physically pops out, you're all set.
Tons of space - I have less than a gig of MP3s... I know some nuts who have 10+ GB, but you can get a 40 GB drive for like $100 if you shop around. Access speed isn't too important if it's just being thrown into ramdisk.
Configurable - Can your CD player do Ogg Vorbis? Play other formats? Probably not. Nor could you, say, hack up a Perl script pull the MP3s out of a MySQL database and read the song title with Festival.
Again, I haven't actually tried this, but I'd really like to...
Plexiglass (Score:2, Interesting)
-foxxz
Re:Bonding Small Sheets of Plexiglass? (Score:2, Interesting)
The standard solvent adhesive for "plexiglas" acrylic is methylene chloride. $10 a pint if I remember. It's water-thin and you need to have a good seal between the pieces, but a little practice and it works well. You can also wick it onto a set joint and capillary action will fill the voids in a second coat (keep it positioned exactly - enough of a second try can loosen the first). It's nasty stuff - comes in metal cans.
Not surprised Homer doesn't have this stuff - small hardware stores might - I seem to rememer seeing it in a Sears Hardware specialty store. We have a plastics specialty warehouse in CT.
I used to build custom rodent cages for our lab the same way. Do some dry runs - if you can boil water, you'll find the shortcuts and get good at this. I have a see-thru laser that's lasted nearly 30 years made like this.