I worked a bit more on the car computer this weekend… Everything seemed to work alright except that my hard drive wasn’t mounted very firmly (mainly the cable connection in the back). It was sort of popping in and out once I crammed the case shut (which causes all sorts of problems… š
I *think* that everything else is working. I’ve powered it on and hit the Windows loading screen so I’m happy. Also, I finally wired the car stuff and confirmed that the sequencer works. Now I need to do some initial installation stuff (still haven’t decided whether I’ll use Linux or Windows). The USB ports seem to not be working as expected but hopefully that’s just a BIOS setting or something. I got a nicer 4 pin plug (very similar to the hard drive power plugs) from RadioShack and wired that in so that I can easily plug the whole system in without worrying about individual wires in the back. I also picked up a toggle switch that I’m going to use for manually overriding the power to the system (in case I don’t want it to run all the time when
the car’s on). For fun, I also got a cooler looking blue LED to use for the power indicator on the front panel. I also ended up getting those round IDE cables since the ribbon ones were being a huge pain.
I cheated on the wiring… the cigarette lighter input is ignition controlled… So, what I did was just tapped both the battery 12V+ and the ignition 12V+ into the cigarette lighter slot. This works when you start it up, but it also completely kills the computer when you take the key out (instead of gracefully shutting down using the car battery like it should). I’ll probably fix that when I feel like taking more of the dash out and finding what wire has a 12V+ signal when the car’s off…
Anyway — that’s my progress so far…
