The Car

The sound-mobile The "victim" is a June 1997 Vauxhall Corsa. Being a mid 1997 car, it has all the tweaks that Lotus got to do to the Corsa series in early 1997, mainly suspension and chassis mods. The engine is a nice little 1.5 litre turbo diesel (hey no ignition noise to spoil my audio plans). As Corsas aren't that big, I didn't feel like I wanted to sacrifice any of the boot/trunk space to a PC or inverter to run my MP3/OggVorbis player. So I didn't - the entire system lives under the dashboard and is powered by a compact and very efficient DC to DC converter.

Install History

The first incarnation of the MP3 player was installed at the end of 1999. This pre-dated mini-itx by a few years, and used a 5.25" biscuit PC (Lanner EM-586). This useful piece of kit had everything I needed on a board 6"x8". The overall size of the unit was reduced from its initial 12"x6"x2" to 8"x6"x2". The final size was limited by the size of the motherboard and the height of the CPU cooler. The system was finally retired on the 20th August 2005 after a bad flash upgrade rendered the motherboard unbootable. It gave 6 years of flawless service.
The next install is now being pieced together. With technology 6 years on you get a lot more processing power for your buck, Watt, and inch. The new system will be significantly more powerful for equivalent wattage, and about half the size. The new system will be based on an Advantech PCM-9373 motherboard, which again has everything needed on board. The board is approximately half the size of the EM-586 and can run from a single 5v source (although a 12v supply is recommended for a quality audio output). The character VFD output is to be replaced by a color 800x600 LCD.