The carputer is complete. And by complete I mean it's in and it's working. All of my software enhancements will be taking place over the next little while, but for now I can listen to music, watch movies, war drive, etc. with the existing setup. It's all clean and good to go.

Here are some pictures from the construction.

Dave and I got together Thursday evening to begin the major work for the carputer.
His room mate had parked in front of the garage and left for Colorado, so we could
not get into his heated garage. We began work indoors, and eventually drove to a
friend's house in Lehi to work on the car itself. We pulled an all-nighter which
ultimately ended in a setback when I blew out the LCD screen.

That's my mac mini I have opened up there, I am splicing into the power button
cable so that my car can mimic a button press when it is turned on and off. The
existing power button still works too.

This is the power supply I am using. This thing is actually really cool - it regulates
power to the mac, simulates button presses, monitors my car's battery, and does a
load of other stuff that makes it a perfect solution. When I turn on my car, after about
a 6 second delay it turns my mac on. When the car is off, it provides about ~500m
amps to keep the computer in sleep mode. That way I don't have to wait for it to
boot each time. The power the mac draws on sleep mode could run off my car
battery for several weeks, but if battery drops below 10V, the power supply will
cut power altogether.

Here Dave is securing the screen's PCB in place. This was the original one that I
fried. I have a working one now.

Dave was a huge help with the wiring. Below his left knee there is the most difficult
spot to run cable. It was a huge pain running it through that carpet (especially the
VGA cable). Dave used his shoelace and tied it to the bigger cables to pull them
through. After some frustration, it was all done.

Here is the completed wiring under the back seat. The gold cables are speaker,
the red and black cables are power and USB, and the big black one at the bottom
is VGA. They feed directly into the trunk.

Wiring up everything in back. There's the amp and PSU.

Jake got into town on Saturday and helped me out with the wiring in the trunk. At
first things weren't working and after some head scratching we discovered that
the grounding point I had used was bad and was only providing our circuit with about
5V instead of the required 12V. We found a better ground point and everything
started working.

A bit of testing with the screen while it is sitting in the dash.

Here's Jake.

Today I finished the project, cleaned everything up, and got everything somewhat situated in my trunk. I still need to mount the amp properly, but the power supply and mini are both mounted as they will be permanently. I will take pictures of the final product tomorrow for the blog.