Hi Everybody!

My name is KRS Juan and this is my 2004 Infiniti G35 Coupe



This will be my first Car PC but Im not exactly a newbie. Im an Apple certified tech and have run an independent Apple store for 7 years.
I fix Macs all day, and do about 150 a month, everything from logic board replacements to data recovery, on everything from a Mac 512k to an 8 core MacPro.

I have also installed stereo's in a few cars including amps and subs. VW thing, 89 Ford Bronco, 96 Accord (like 6 times, this things was super easy to break into and I lived in the hood), but never a luxury car (it's luxury to me!).

I have gathered about 90% of what I think I need, the last few items are delayed slightly. Im waiting on Mp3Car.com to get more Carnetix P1900 MacPac's before ordering the 1900 and kit (should be end of this month).
I have not decided on a screen (Lilliput vs Xenarc) and will have to wait on that for budget reasons anyway.
I still have to buy the audio adapter that plugs into the G35's satellite input for audio.

Blah blah blah, enough with the chit chat, show us the goods!



Viola!

WTF you say? Am I seeing double??? Did I take too much vicodin last night? NOPE!!! There's 2 MacMini's.



On the left, duller (in finish, not personality) and slightly yellowed from sunlight is my trusty G4 MacMini with all the fixins. It's a 1.33 with 1gb ram and a brand new 120gb drive. Superdrive, Airport, and bluetooth. It was going to be a media center in my living room, but my hacked xBox with XMBMC was simply better, and rather than risk an affair and the inevitable messy fallout, the Mini was loaded with OS X Server and forced to server a few million webpages against it's will. Sometimes tough love is the only route, and it was harder on me than it was on it. It will understand when it grows up, be it through therapy or liquor.

On the right is an absolute virgin Macmini Intel (yes I checked). This little guy is a 1.66 with 2gbs of ram, a 120gb drive, combo drive, airport, and bluetooth.

I have not decided which Mini will go into the G35 but we can get into that later, back to the goodies.





If I do go with the PowerPc MacMini Im going to need IR (actually I really don't NEED it, but it's still kinda cool)
This is an old Keyspan one, if I end up using it I will take it apart and mount the bare components on behind the console somewhere.





Im adding a lot more AC powered items than the Carnetix can run (I think???) so I picked this giant thing off Woot (www.woot.com)
600w continuos 1200w peak surge I think it will do the job, but it's huge so it has to go in the trunk.





We live in a video world and you never know when some stupid recording might make you a bazillionaire.
With a little paint this tiny cam can be hidden easily and it's adjustable mount gives me some ideas. I think I can set it up to record in the cabin or get flipped over to see the road ahead.



Look how small this thing is compared to an iSight! It's USB and doesn't do audio, but who cares?





Im a TV *****, literally. Being a Mac Tech in LA, a huge amount of my paycheck comes from TV and film companies. To keep these smarmy self-centered bastards happy I have watch their shows and pretend to like them.
And besides, HDTV in my F*CKING CAR! Anyone know of a small HDTV antenna? Or maybe one to take apart and hide in say the A pillar or door molding?





It's cheap and old, but this MacAlly controller is one of my favorites. It works great with emulators which is the most likely thing me and my passengers will be playing on a 7 inch screen.





I've got lots of USB crap, so a good quality powered USB hub is a must. This ones a Dr Bott 4 port, but Im actually going to use a 7 port. The dr Botts are nice and small.
This hub will be for permanently connected USB items and will most likely be behind my dash.





This odd hub was another Woot score



It has both USB and Firewire and it's slim profile will make it good for my glovebox. All the temporary use devices will plug into this.





The ubiquitous Griffin Powermate. As you can see from the yellowing cable I have had this for a long time. Im excited to finally have a good use for it.





The Belkin Nostromo. Originally designed for first person shooters, it's quickbuttons and thumb based directional pad begged me to put them in my car. Its kinda big and designed for the left hand but was less than $10.
There's a newer version that looks much smaller and might be a better choice.

 

This little devices makes me wonder if i'm brilliant or retarded. It's from Addonics (www.addonics.com) and it turns 2 compact flash cards into a 2.5 ATA (laptop or PowerPC MacMini) hard drive.
I don't have any large CF cards yet, but I pulled a 4gb microdrive from a dead iPod Mini and installed a bare-bones Tiger on it for ****s and giggles. It works but is pretty slow, and even a basic Tiger install leaves little room for caching or VM space.

Anyone know if those "fast" CF cards are much faster than a Microdrive?

I could take two 4gb or 8gb CF cards and RAID stripe them to make a decent boot drive.

My theory is that since they are solid state they will wont be effected by driving over LA's streets and wont generate as much heat as a normal drive.
This is one of the biggest reasons I want to use the PowerPC MacMini.





A LaCie 100gb firewire drive. This will be used to transfer movies and music from other sources and will have an emergency boot partition for repairs as well (I did mention I was a Mac Tech right?).





YAWS (Yet Another Woot Score) is this Gyration Mini Keyboard and Mouse. Im 90% sure i wont use the mouse especially since it needs to be recharged in it's cradle and that has to be plugged into AC power. The RF reciever runs off USB power
and the keyboard uses AAA batteries.





Here we have a Motorola Boost i455 running Mologogo. Following the threads on Mp3Car.com I got the phone working as a slow modem, and a ghetto Lojack using Mologogo and Google maps.

There's also a US Globalsat BU-535 Waterproof USB GPS. All of you know the current state of Mac GPS software, and it aint pretty. I've been playing with GPS2gex/Google earth on my 12" powerbook G4 and the Boost phone as a modem and it doesn't seem that bad. I kind of like Roadnav x as well, but then again I don't need turn-by-turn. I have a very good sense of direction so as long as it can show me where I am and what's near by I will be happy. Routebuddy's demo is a joke as it comes with no maps and has the ABSOLUTE WORST PROGRAM RUINING WATERMARK EVER USED!!!! I cant seen to find file that might possibly start with a T, end in T, and has orren in the middle.



That brings us back to the PowerPC vs Intel issue, sure I can run parallels or bootcamp and some windows apps but that defeats a lot of the reasons to use a mac for me.
I really want all my apps to use Growl (www.growl.info).
I want all my apps to use the Mac OS X speech engine and I have some really cool voices from Cepstral (http://www.cepstral.com/) with accents!
Tiger has some very cool voice control features that tied with Applescript studio can do some awesome stuff.
None of these work with windows apps. Im not a windows guy, im a mac guy. the thought of using windows anything on a regular basis gives me the chills and makes my 11th toe tingle.

Bluephone Elite will do the handsfree thing as well as caller ID and addressbook stuff. The Bluetooth proximity script will be used to secure the GUI using the phone. Right now the phone is a lame Razr V3 but thats just keeping me mobile
until the iPhone comes out (yes i'm steve jobs' bitch).


Some of the other stuff thats not pictured that I plan to at least play with in the Carputer but are not part of the master plan:

Nintendo Wiimote - A cool bluetooth input device that has mac drivers and I have an extra one.
Griffin Radioshark - Don't really need another radio in the car and I do use it to record at home, but the new HD one has my interest.
Backup camera - get another Pico cam and use it for a backup camera



So there you have it folks! What did I forget? What isn't a good idea? What's pure genius? Pure madman? Should I shut the hell up and go away?
Questions? Answers? Hate mail?

Thanks,
-KRS Juan-

(P.S. Yes I did post this on mp3car.com, but this forum looked kinda empty, and I really want some input from other G owners)

 

Looking good, I was thinking about going with a mac mini in the upper cubby hole on the passenger side but I fear macs I am a pc guy so I went that route. Have you picked out your frontend yet?

Oh and as a rap fan.... awesome name

 

Looking good....subscribed. Whats the plan for the front end?

 

Meth68 & gizsf

Thanks for looking!

The front end issue is still being decided. If I go with the PPC macmini, I am limited to half done, semi functional front ends like AMP (now xAMP). Mac native front-ends are almost non-existant.

If I go with the Intel mini then I can use Frodoplayer and the like in Parallels, but I loose all the cool mac stuff I want to use.


Then again with VoiceOver, RemoteBuddy, and some applescripts who really needs a front end?

Obviously I am still working this stuff out.

-KRS Juan-

 

I am up in the air with my front end, I think I may just go streetdeck. From reading around it just seems like its the most advanced or atleast cleaned up for pc's. I dont believe frodoplayer has the auto mute for navi yet? Or atleast it didn't a little while ago and thats pretty important to me.

gizsf any frontend suggestions?

 

KRS JUAN, are there issues with macs constantly rewriting data on th CF cards like windows?

Don't mean to hijack, but... ..
I'm using an older version of Centrafuse (1.3, it's always been good to me and simple), and Streetdeck. What you need to do is try out a few different free front ends and find out what kind of features you like about them...then you can make your decision from there.

 

Gizsf: Um...what kinda problems w/ Windows and CF cards? Mac OS X is essentially BSD unix and therefore does do lots of caching/page-ins and page-outs/and swap disk writing.

Screwing around the other day w/ the CF to 2.5" adapter and a 4gb MicroDrive, I was able to install a stripped down version of OS X that was bootable. It ran fine but was quite slow, not unusable, but not ideal. Plus the install left only about 500mb which is not enough swap space.

Im going to get a 4gb CF card and try the same thing and do some benchmarks. Maybe even RAID the 2 cards together and see what happens.

-KRS Juan-

 

Solid state drives have a limited read/write life compared to standard hard drives. There are some better ones on the market which are comercial grade can can be written over many more times, but still nowhere to the extent of a disc based hard drive. In windows, if I remember right , you have to disable the disk caching to limit the constant re-writes of data onto the CF drive. I personally was also considering going with a CF drive, but when I started my build there wasn't many descent choices for those drives that were reasonably priced. Just make sure to do a ghost copy of your drive so in case of any failures, it's an easy fix.

 

So I finally made some more progress:

Settled on the Intel MacMini, installed tons of Apps and stuff over the long weekend. I'll make a list of everything with links when I have a chance. Besides all the mac stuff I installed Parallels with an XP image and an unbuntu image, got iGuidance up and running with my GPS, and all the drivers for all the USB junk I'm using. So far it's looking really good and I have to say I am excited!

All thats left is to decide (and buy) the following:

Carnetix P1900 vs P2140

USA-Spec PA11–NIS vs Pac Audio AAI-NIS2

XENARC 700IDT vs Lilliput GL701-NP/C/T


This is exactly what I want to do screen-wise, except with one of the above mentioned screens instead of the Pioneer AVIC:
https://g35driver.com/forums/showpos...4&postcount=13


Advice? Suggestions? Comments?

-KRS Juan-

 

You are my hero. I have wanted to do this since before I got my G actually... I would second the carnetix adapter, then perhaps you wouldn't have to have quite as large of an inverter for the rest of your stuff.

I've also heard good things about the lilliput screens, I am sort of torn between doing a lilliput/mac mini combo vs Pioneer nav/mac mini setup... the lilliput gets touchscreen and higher res, but the pioneer is a much more bona fide solution for nav and dvd playback... so who knows really.

They designed that map compartment for a mac mini and keyboard, you know....

 

isn't there a dual-din kit that replaces the stock stereo controls instead of popping out of the top storage compartment?
For mine it will definitely be in the lower dash (OEM location)...

 

Lancer: Thanks for checkin my thread out. I ordered the Carnetix 1900 with MacPac and extra 5v adapter last weekend and it will be here at the end of the week.

There is a dual-din kit with new dash and a/c controls, but I dont plan on replacing my head unit, prefer the stock look, and dont want to spend that kind of cash.
My end goal is to have everything look 100% stock when all is said and done.


Not only did I order the Carnetix but I also picked up the USA-Spec PA11-NIS yesterday, so now all I need is the screen and Im ready for install!!!

-KRS Juan-

 

You can just tap the useless floppy power cable (or HD power cable) for the 5v rail.

 

how about on a cheaper note, i came across this.... http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=N7005&cat=MON

Using this with griffin controller, not touchscreen, not vga either...

It seems fishy, but for exploring how to mount a motorized screen, this seems to be the cheapest option.. I'm about to take the plunge, is this a safe site? Anyone got something from them before?