We (my wife and I) are looking into buying a car. Apart from the usual struggles like what type and what colour, the question came up 'what extras?' This is all a bit premature considering that I don't have a US drivers 'license' (for those that don't know me, I'm a Brit living in America) and we live in New York where there is absolutely no space to park a car.
Constructing electronics gizmos is a hobby of mine so I stared thinking about how I could install an GPS based tracking system into this fictional car of ours. What's that got to do with the title of this page? Nothing really except that having decided that I could do with PC in my car (Uber Geek or what?) I realised that it could do much more than the GPS stuff. What about music?
The problem with most car Hi-Fi systems is that they are very limited. The radio is fine for a while but get very 'samey' on long journeys. Tapes and CD's are OK until you run through your collection. I have a fairly large collection of music on my PC in the MP3 format so I thought that transfering it to the car would me a good idea.
OK, OK. Enough with the shpiel already! How does it work? A PC complete with sound card and some sort of network card (as well as the GPS stuff) is loaded into the boot (trunk) of the car. An LCD display and numeric keypad is installed by the driver and connected to the printer and keyboard ports respectivley. Onto the PC is loaded the MP3 music files and an MP3 playing software package. Quite simple really.
Click on the menu bar to look at the various components and drop me a line if you decide to build your own.
© & ® Mark A Phillips, G7LTT 1998/99/2000
This page was last updated Thursday January 03, 2002 14:54 -0000