DescentBB

Well, I was trying to decide on an cd/mp3 player. Well I was talking to Psionik and he mentioned the idea of buying a hard drive mp3 player for my car. Well, I began to think about this concept. Anyone know if it is possible to build your own? This guy apparently did: http://www.ryanspc.com/carmp3/index.pl? ... nsole2.jpg

I've heard of people doing that with the Mac mini as well. It's a cool idea. If you have enough HD space you could include movies too.

RC

basically, it looks like this guy made a very cheap PC for his car. What I want to know though, is what kind of power supply/adaptor he used? You would probably have to convert 12V to 110 Watts. I would like too accomplish the same task but smaller and cheaper if possible. And my last question, how does he shut it down without killing his system?

I'd make my own power supply for the system. The PSU in your computer outputs +15,+/-12, and +5 I think. The car will run at ~13 volts when it's on. Filter the line and add some voltage regulators, and I think you can pull off powering the system without converting up to AC just to convert back down. You might be able to find something that will do it... Otherwise an electrical engineer could show you how to do it.

Most PC power supplies put out 3.3v, 5v and 12v, it is better to adapt an inverter and a PC power supply to do what you need then trying to then risk trying to run it directly off the DC from the car battery.

But surely you can buy a head-unit with a HDD in it, and with a USB socket on the front? Or just the USB socket? Hell, you can get 4GB flash memories reasonably cheap, and 8GB are available. That should be enough music for any trip, anywhere.

http://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=c ... 8&oe=utf-8

Get a real switch-mode power supply designed for automotive use. They're more expensive than a linear regulated supply, but they're also more reliable and better able to protect your hardware from the voltage transients and so forth that frequent car power rails.

The power rails required by modern computers are +/-12v, + (and sometimes -, depends on the mobo) 5v, 3.3v, and 5vsb (standby power). The 12v needs to be pretty beefy, as that's what operates the CPU's PSU on the mobo as well as the motors in HDDs and optical drives.

Or get a Rio Karma (portable MP3 player released in 2003), the dock has line out on it, and the thing can work via RJ45 ethernet (wifi adapter anyone? copy music from your residence ). Or get an iPod. Both of these cases assuming your head unit has an aux or line input of some sort... If you already have an MP3 player, it's much cheaper to just buy a nice head unit with such an input than it is to put a computer in your car.

I'd just wait for the DVD versions of the mp3 head units.

Or get this:
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid ... PA&cat=CON