My Lilliput 619GL-70TV/C/T arrived yesterday. It is a 7" model, with touchscreen, perfect for our project. And a very important part too, as it will be one of the only parts that will always be visible.

Resources

mp3car.com

Great resource for everything that's somehow related to in-car entertainment PCs, complete with community forums. A little windows-centric, but they also have a Linux forum.

eGalax Touchscreen with Linux

How to set up your Lilliput 619GL-70NP touchscreen under Linux. This might be obsolete on modern kernels, I have no idea. I guess I'll find out when my touchscreen arrives, which won't be long.

IBM Devworks / Setting up a touchscreen

Another resource on setting up touchscreens under Linux, straight from IBM's DeveloperWorks site.

EpiaWiki

The Epia Wiki: your source for everything Via Epia + Linux related. A bit gentoo-oriented, but if you know your Linux you can easily make abstraction of the distro specific info and get your stuff running under any distro you happen to prefer.

AWBM Tools

Explains how to change your boot logo on the Award Medalist BIOSes used on many Via Epia boards; I can confirm this works on mine (Via Epia MII 12000 Nehemiah) since I already changed the bootlogo on it. The tools you need, except for an image editor capable of saving in 256 color TIFF are the AWBM Tools themselves, CBROM 2.xx (I used 2.15; unfortunately Windows only) or AwardMod if you prefer, and of course a BIOS and flash tool (again, Windows only).

VideoKeg Whitepaper

This has nothing to do with CarPCs per se, but it's another decent resource on the epia/touchscreen combo for entertainment PCs, and some of the stuff is applicable to carPC's as well.

The Ford Escort Owners Association

Since this project is going to be built in two Ford Escort's, this might come in handy for more information about the wiring etc.

Directions Navigator

Commercial GPS navigation software for Linux. The only decent navigation software for Linux we found so far; most other so-called "navigation" packages such as gpsdrive work on bitmaps instead of vectormaps, and thus are only useful for showing your current position on the map, but not useful at all for planning trips since they can't distinguish between a road and a forest. This one though does just that: it allows you to plan a trip and gives you turn-by-turn directions until you reach your destination.

How to mod your Lilliput

This is a step-by-step guide to mod your Lilliput screen so that you can use custom made buttons and integrate your Lilliput into your dashboard.

IBM DevWorks / Boot Linux Faster

An article over at IBM's DeveloperWorks site explaining how to use "gnu make" to seriously slash your boot times.

GStreamer and Python

An article explaining the steps necessary to use GStreamer in your Python application.

Similar Projects

R-Kraft

One word: respect! Found this little gem on the mp3car.com forums and let me tell you, this one's a beauty! The site is now in both French and English, with more info on his mp3car.com forum thread. Worth checking out if you happen to prefer the "lotsa bells n' whistles" approach. Despite the functionality, his approach follows the same basic guidelines that I am aiming for: simplicity first; if a feature distracts or is in the way, either rework it or ditch it. If you need a commercial solution that not only plays music, but also plays DVDs, logs your engine's performance stats and does GPS, all in one user-friendly package that doesn't require you to be a coputer guru to use, you might want to check out his shop.

DashWerks

Home of DashPC. Another over the top approach towards a carPC. Too many bells and whistles on this one for my taste, most of them actually degrading the user experience, like controls for locking the doors which have to be accessed by first selecting the corresponding tab, while there's goddamn handles on the door to accomplish exactly the same without having to muck about with some overblown user interface. But apparently some people prefer the possibility to do stuff in awkward ways like using their laptops to log into their TV and change the channel while there's a perfectly good remote on the coffee table two feet to the left, next to their soda. Oh well... At least it runs Linux, thus proving that you can even make crap using the best of tools, as if this still needed to be proven.

Jon Bell's Labs - Car Linux MP3 Player

If you always wanted to drive around in a car that just spells out "geek living in mom's basement", this might be the look you're aiming for. This is the ultimate geek ghetto car poster child. However, the approach isn't necessarily bad; provided the project gets a nice front, the untidy cable mess is hidden out of view. Assuming the interface is sound, this might be a valid approach for those not wanting to go all the way and using expensive touchscreens and whatnot.

WRX Car Computer Project

The site is offline at the time of writing, and I have no clue how good or bad the project was, but seeing as how totally unimpressed I am with current CarPC projects under Linux (the R-Kraft project notwithstanding; kudos again to that guy) I doubt it was anything to get your knickers wet over. Still thought I should at least mention the project.

The last of the critical parts to this project (the mainboard and the RAM) have arrived two days ago. Today I finally got around to post something about it. I'd probably would've gotten them sooner but there was a problem with delivery which caused a small delay.

OK, on to the hardware... If you've never seen an epia board in person, it's hard to appreciate just how small they really are. I knew it was small, I seen the pictures, I cut out a 17x17cm cardboard square to check for clearance, but when it arrived I was still surprised at how small the whole thing was. Pictures don't do it justice; you gotta hold one in your hand to realize how well put together this thing is.

The project is currently in the hardware-acquisition state. The acquisitions are listed in the following table, prices include shipping costs:

Bought two more parts over the last couple of weeks: a 2.5" laptop hard drive and a 3.5" to 2.5" hard drive adapter, though I already lent the hard drive to a friend whose laptop broke down. The only parts I'm still missing now are the mainboard, the PSU, the touchscreen and a custom case. The touchscreen and case are not necessary, and I can make due with a normal ATX power supply for now and just attach the mainboard to my KVM for i/o, so I'll probably get started on the software as soon as I get the mainboard I ordered today. It will be fun to see yet another media project PC start out as a bunch of hardware lying loose on my desk...

A friend of my uncle who works in a Ford garage was so kind to set me up with the first part for this project: a broken Ford radio/CD head unit. Now I couldn't care less what functionality the radio has nor what it looks like, I just needed a double DIN radio frame to stuff the computerparts into.

This is what the fully assembled unit looks like: