viperguy

Do what I did, buy some KYB AGX shocks from the states, ~1100 to my door for all four corners. Not height adjustable so no cert needed but are damper adjustable so can set them pretty stiff when needed. I'm happy with mine

Comes together pretty easily with the right hardware tbh. Only real issue I have now is a bit of a voltage drop on the power supply lines, I might need to source my permanent +12v from somewhere more direct than the supplied feed in the dash, as I seem to have quite a lot of voltage drop on that line during cranking so the carputer always dies. I did find out that the ACC feed actually passed essentially 0 current (about 0.1mA if i remember correctly), its merely a voltage signal to the hardware to say the ignition is turned on, I had always kind of thought it was the other way around such that permanent +12v was just for a tiny supply for devices to remember settings, and the ACC was the main feed activated when you turned the ignition on. But no, permanent +12v is for "standby memory" as well as main draw when equipment gets the signal to turn on from the ACC line. So I\'ll probably rewire my permanent +12v to my amplifier feed which has a 2 or 4 AWG feed direct to the battery which should have much less of a voltage drop, in theory anyways ;D

Well mounted carputer to back of sub, just screwed a metal bar/plate to the sub box and used a strip of industrial velcro. Removeable and secure... *thumbs-up* Pic up in the weekend. On a side note, have killed a few rattles in the wagon during the upgrade by beefing up the rubber stops on the rear hatch, tightening a swaybar bolt, and gluing my boost guage properly ;D

its just in the boot basically where the old one is, I\'m going to mount it on the back of the sub so it\'s out of the way so cables dont risk damage and frees up some boot space and since its all solid state I dont really care about vibrations. In use it has definately met expectations, plenty of speed to provide an extremely fluid experience so all-in-all I am happy with the upgrade.

Well fun weekend pulling the car to bits and re-routing/installing cables: System seems to work all as intended with the ignition triggering, just more little odd jobs to do like install a powered usb hub in the glovebox for connecting things to the system as well as charging phones etc. One other thing I want to do is put a bypass switch in the dash with an illuminated button, so that I can both disable the system from turning if i dont feel the need, as well as see if it is currently running (light will run off same feed powering the screen which gets switched on and off with the carputer) this switch just needs to be put in line with the ACC feed to the carputer power supply to control whether it thinks the key is on or off.

Well CPU power cable is all made up and working fine: System had its first boot off the power supply at lunchtime, so that was a benchmark. Now just need to program the delays and things into the power supply and try it out for realsies once the car is properly wired up.

well hardware has all shown up so PC is all put together for the most part, just need to wire the car power up properly. Pretty picture below of the system: only real issue putting it all together was the SSD caddy hitting the fan, but nothing some robust shaving couldnt fix, case also has an external molex power connector so I wil use that to supply power to the case rather than drill a big ass hole in it for a multipin connector. So thats the 4 wires exiting the case, +12v, ACC, ground, and the power supply also has an amplifier turn-on lead, so I will use that to drive a relay to switch power to the LCD screen in the dash so that it turns on and off with the system. Remaining items are make/buy a molex to P4 cpu power connector and install all the software, then its just install the PC and re-incorporate all the USB devices etc I have in the car.

heh cheers guys, i figure the info might be useful for some other crazy person that decides to go down the same path. I know a lot of people are going down the tablet or phone route as the hardware and capabilities have progressed so far over the years, particularly with the likes of google maps and the media capabilities of modern devices. For me though i like the idea of an embedded system that is just always present in the car to just turn on and use, rather than a phone you have to clip into some holder and change to some car mode then remove every time you leave the car just so you can have your phone with you, or a tablet to get some screen real-estate which doesn\'t integrate easily into the dash without a heap of fabrication issues or be a theft magnet hanging from your windscreen (or fall off in the twisties, this is still a Subaru forum after all . Going down this road also lets me re-purpose the hardware as another HTPC, or snappy little desktop machine, if I ever get sick of the carputer. The downside though is with all the tablets and phones being used for this now, the development on PC front-ends has rather been put on the backburner, so not exactly an exciting time to get into it on that front, but they certainly came far enough to still be valid today, just not as many options under active development to pick and choose from as there used to be.

Well motherboard was out of stock so swapped over to this nifty number: http://www.gigabyte.co.nz/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4601#ov Not much difference besides the fact it doesnt have on-board power so will have to buy one of these... http://www.mini-box.com/M3-ATX-DC-DC-ATX-Automotive-Computer-car-PC-Power-Supply Which isnt all that bad as it natively ties in to the ignition system in the same fashion headunits do, so switches the carputer on and off automagically with a number of customisable options regarding delays and fancy things like adjustable low-voltage cut-off etc which the old system never had which left me with a flat battery a stupid number of times, so will be happy to implement that.

Well with christmas holidays coming up and a big 2-week south island trip all planned and booked, Ive decided to give the carputer project a refresh in the form of a brand new build for GPS and entertainment duties on the road. This will consist of a mini-itx motherboard powered by an Intel Core-i3 3.3ghz CPU, with a 550MB/s SSD (yes MB) and some speedy RAM which should give the thing a real kick in the pants as the old computer I was using was a bit slow to really meet the expectations we all have today with system responsiveness etc (I\'m primarily doing the new build for an extremely quick booting system out of hibernate, on par with a CD player starting up). The old PC just didn\'t have the processing power or system bus throughput to facilitate this, being a 1.6ghz Atom (pretty much comparable to a high end cellphone nowadays, considering they can emulate windows XP easily enough). So just waiting on parts and will throw some pics up when built, the rest of the system should stay pretty much the same at this stage...but just as some info, the motherboard chosen is an intel DQ77KB, chosen because it has SATA 6gps ports (as a SATA 3gbps port doesn\'t have the bandwidth to max out the SSD drive) it also has a DC socket for its power supply, so runs straight off my existing car laptop power adaptor. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-board-dq77kb.html

yeah riderunner can be a bit of a mission to get set up right but works ok with some time an effort sunk into it

can get the latest riderunner here, need to register for an online store to download it but not too much of a hassle, its still free http://www.mp3car.com/road-runner/ can find the DFX skin in the skin section yeah the open source is turn by turn, its called Navigator Free and just uses the open map project, can get maps from here: http://nzopengps.org/

gone away from centrafuse, prefer the open source stuff so I run Riderunner with the DFX skin...the garmin side of things is a bit shifty*, can PM you a link to my ftp server if you wanna grab it but theres open source alternatives out there which use the open map project...just not as polished on the interface side of things probably time for an updated video, cant even remember what I was showing off back then *actually probably not shifty as I dont think they even sell or support it any more

those things have certainly come along in the last few years, a little hardcoded with respect to media playback though, probably pretty good, but with a PC just install a new codec and away you go... Plus with the PC touch screen you can interface with hardware control devices, relays/lighting/temperature sensors to do nifty things

finallly getting around to doing something new with this project...power control was always a little buggy because I was using the built-in features of the carputer front-end to do some of the power control...which is a little "special" and turned out to be not so reliable with setting a particular flag before it went into hibernation, so a little too much maintenance anyways. So here comes Mr Arduino to save the day, and provide me with a dedicated microprocessor for power control, along with nifty features like blinking power LED\'s when the pc is warming up and shutting down etc. (if I choose to program them in) which should provide for much improved reliability with start-up and shutdown. As well as any number of custom features that wont rely on a power hungry PC being on to implement. Info here for anyone wanting a heads-up http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno

alarm = no go due to drain on battery, better dedicated options out there already obdII logger = old subies (pre 98 i think) have pretty poor OBD support, I think my MY97 wrx gives me most parameters (injector on time, battery, throttle position etc) quite slow update speed though, somewhere around 2Hz per parameter maybe less? Open to correction on that though. Modern cars have great support though and plenty of interface options (bluetooth etc) software dash generally comes with the OBDII side of things, again ready to roll options out there already...http://evoscan.limitless.co.nz/ is a great resource My system is really just targeted towards music playback and gps, also could be handy as a trackday tool...webcams plastered around the car with gps/obdII logging etc etc

Real world experience with the SSD was found to be lacking, really not a dramatic difference with such a slow system so the SSD will be re-purposed into my new silent home theatre pc build which will have the hardware to actually make use of the SSD speed.

The carputer just has a usb connected input/output unit, which can directly drive the relay which powers the sprayer pump, so theres nothing automatic about the watersprayer at the momment (although there could be if i wanted to) its just a button on the screen to give it a momentary squirt or a continuous feed. The wing mirror control works the other way, I use a wing mirror control as a joystick for the carputer (track skipping primarily, as its easier to feel for the knob, than take ur eyes off the road to touch the screen) PLC? Not all that capable as far as I'm aware, my windows based pc runs wifi-scanning software, gps, video and music playback, anything you can imagine really including native support for streaming any passengers iphone/ipod music library wirelessly to the audio system

Who do I need to talk to re these magical adaptors, I have money I'd like to part with...

Update: Replaced hard drive with an SSD, cuts boot and hibernation times by 23% as well as being shock proof and making general usability a lot snappier $120 for 60GB which just holds my OS, music, and various support files for the software I run (map data for the gps etc) with a few gig to spare (the drive it replaced was a 320GB) The SSD is kind of wasted on such a low spec machine but due to it being hibernated and resumed so much, a drive that can do this hard-drive intensive operation as quickly as possible is desireable. The benchmarking I did was just timing restarts, there may be further speed gains to be had by actually reinstalling the OS and reinstall all software onto the fresh build rather than just writing the backup of the old drive straight onto the SSD, but i really couldnt be bothered. My little benchmarking table is below for anyone interested [table] [tr] [td]Pre SSD (Time in seconds) Restart 1 Restart 2 Restart 3 Restart 4 Restart 5 Average 87 79 76 77 82 80.2 Post SSD (Time in seconds) Restart 1 Restart 2 Restart 3 Restart 4 Restart 5 Average 63 62 61 60 62 61.6 % Difference Restart 1 Restart 2 Restart 3 Restart 4 Restart 5 Average 27.59 21.52 19.74 22.08 24.39 23.19 [/td] [/tr] [/table]

thoughts for future are active RFID tage on keychain, so proximity to car will unlock the doors and unset the alarm...and vice versa when leaving the car....active rfid is expensive though and the tags arent that small

i presume you read my carpc thread? Dont necessarily need to go itx...

nah not for security...too much of a drain on the battery to have it running all the time...will kill the battery dead after sitting for a few hours....although when you put it like that its great for security

yeah its all a little unnecessary but a fun little side project nonetheless, another usefull feature is the fact that you can run an appletv emulator, so anyone with an ipod can stream music over the cars wifi network to the audio system because the ipod thinks it can airplay

update? no dramas, just chugs along really....as good as you can expect for freeware in a fringe computer field 99% of usage is playing music...with GPS features thrown in which was handy for new years travelling....gave up on voice recognition...car is too loud and voice recognition is buggy at the best of times....I replaced the speech recognition button with intercooler water spray activation shutdown controller got sorted in the end.... i got the screen from MP3car.com, they have an e-store ~$450 kiwi dollars I think? maybe less If i was going to do the project again, i would use an intel i-something uATX mobo and use a dedicated carpc power supply....much better power control handling...and based on what I've experienced a faster cpu would be of benefit in general usability rather than the nettop im currently using with a 1.6GHz atom cpu, and an SSD would have massive speed (since the system is constantly being hibernated and resumed) and shockproof advantages...and not too expensive nowadays...and all your music could happily live on a 64GB usb stick for the same reasons But to be fair it takes a pretty decent pothole to make the track skip from the PC...about the same needed to make a CD skip but i think my buffering settings need looking at