[gorkish]

Love and remember this project -- as someone who has also been jamming customized PC computers into cars since the mid 90's, I really believe that there is still a lot of unrecognized potential in having the ability to carry your own personal data and applications with you. I used to have the top viewed install on the MP3Car forums back in the early 2000's when that site was kind of the central hub for these projects. Unfortunately at some point those archives went offline and and an overwhelming amount of information on hundreds of these projects were lost.

At that time you have to realize that some cars were shipping with tape decks and others were shipping with big screen nav systems that sucked. The objective was to replace that junk with a touchscreen PC, make it look like it was built that way, make it integrate with the car as much as possible, then make it do everything you could ever want to do in a car. My install had: automatic backup camera, in-dash dvd, timeshift recording for am/fm, xm satellite, and uhf/vhf tv, gps navigation, 4.1 audio, music/movie playback from hdd or usb, wifi hotspot, cell modem, integration with the car's accessory bus (steering wheel buttons/react to events), basically the works. I even eventually got my system fully working with LinuxBios (Via EPIA-M) which was fun, but not something I ever want to have to repeat.

I did eventually come to learn that trying to build and maintain a full telematics suite for a userbase of one was a foolish endeavor. Today I have a small Raspberry Pi running 24/7 as a headless NAS in my car though if I had the time I would probably like to upgrade it to a small proxmox hyperconverged cluster instead. My car goes mostly everywhere I go, and when it doesn't, I can fall back to VPN. If this sounds interesting to anyone else, I'd highly recommend giving it a try, though it's a lot easier to deal with the constant power requirement in an EV.

[mrbuttons454]

That's an interesting idea, and I'd love to see more about your current setup if you have it posted anywhere. I've also thought about having something like that. I have a Model 3 with a web browser and the ability to connect to wifi. I thought about having a small PC of some sort with cellular connectivity for the same reason, my car is almost always where I am.

I do wonder about the power draw though. Even though I'm driving a car with a huge battery, leaving things like sentry mode on while parked does hit my range in a noticeable way, roughly 3-5% in a typical day. I considered a battery for just the PC, essentially a mini UPS made of 18650s or some such, but haven't gotten much further than just letting the idea percolate.

[gorkish]

My current setup is a pi 4 with a big usb ssd plugged into a usb power bank which is itselfpowered from 12v. Only thing “integrated” is I run marcone/teslausb. The power draw is inconsequential compared to powering the mcu & sentry, and I have never worried about it. My first 12v battery lasted a pretty normal 5 years. I have heard other folks have canbus interfaces or run apps that can be accessed via the in-car browser, but I don’t know much about things in those domains other than sniffing some battery cell data once. If you want to properly tinker with Teslas you have to basically be invited to join Fight Club, so it hasn’t been very appealing to try to get into. The culture is very different, and it doesn’t interest me much.

[mips_r4300i]

Another one here for the mp3car forums. Saw a build inside a VW beetle with the LCD bezel bondo'd into the center console and it looked pro.

I picked up a 8" Lilliput LCD, a mini-itx board and a picopsu, and jammed it behind the stereo area. Made the LCD bezel out of the plastic sidewall of a floppy organizer case, but spray painted textured black.

In VB6 you could use the windows media player ActiveX control to introspect your media library. So I could scroll through all my songs on the touch screen with my custom app. And running XP with NTfs meant you could shut off the power at any time with disk corruption.