I am thinking it might have been antenna also. I bought the antenna that comes in the package deal with iguidance, Can't remember the name now...

It made me mad that it only worked at times, very rarely

 

Yeah that can piss you off. Were you hibernating or standing by? USB is notorious for not handling these states well. In other words, if the GPS is working fine when you hibernate, it probably won't be when you resume the PC. There is a work around for this however.

 

So, Do you think Stand By is the way to go as far as when the car is turned off?

I will have to go get on my other pc to look at the list of pc parts used, but the power supply is probably close to the same one you used. It had the amp turn on, and all that good stuff. I still got a pop when the amp would turn on which confused me for a while as It should not have done that.

I will also post up a pic of my carpc case, It was my first attempt at any real fab work

 

Yeah, the amp shouldn't pop, but there may be another reason for that but who knows. I like standby as opposed to hibernate for the time savings when you start up. Hibernate still takes quite a while. Of course hibernate draws no power when the car isn't running and stanby does. However it is such a minute draw in mili-amperes that it would take quite a while to drain the battery. I would say at least a week or two for a complete drain. My power supply monitors this and will shut the PC down completely before this happens so you never have a dead battery.

If you aren't going to use the car for longer than a week or two, just do a complete shut down and you will drain no juice at all. About the case fabrication... it don't have to be pretty, cuz no one sees it.

 

I'm starting to save my pennies right now for a fancy screen. I have an old PII sitting her that I can use. This will be my summer project! I will just need to find a place to hide the PC as I'm using the spare tire area for my JL 450/4.

Great work Jeff!

 

Thanks Jim. It doesn't help if you are set on using the PIII you have, but you can get a PC setup that will fit under our seats or over the gas tank. They make a motherboard that is 7"x7". It fits in a case that looks like an amp and is only a couple inches tall. The power supply and hard drive are all contianed inside. The disk drive is external. It might be ideal in your case, however we may be able to shoe horn your PIII over the gas tank as well. If you need a hand, let me know.

As I am sure you can see by the pics, I ended up not being able to use your tire area rack I needed an extra 1/2" so I made my own out of lluan. Just barely made it that way, but now I have plenty of room above the CPU fan for excelent air flow.

 

Well, With the setup I had in the Teg it was visable so I wanted it to be halfway decent. I will post some pics of the setup I had going before I uninstalled it. It was unfinished though..

 

Will a PII run all this software?

 

How many mhz is it? If it's at least 1ghz, I would say it'll be more than fine. I ran an 800mhz setup for a while with no trouble. 512 RAM is recomended, so make sure the board can handle it.

 

Wow, this is really cool. I'm impressed with what you've done -- thanks for sharing!

Now where do I get one?