This year it doesn’t feel like the holidays. I don’t know why that is, but the older I get the more December feels just like any other day. When I was little December felt happy and fun. Now its just annoying. I don’t even want to think about what it will feel like in another 25 years. Maybe its because I’m single and I don’t have a lot of happy things going on. Daphne was never into the holidays or anything like that. My computer at work keeps crashing. Its frustrating to work with defective hardware. I am easily frustrated when computers (hardware or software) don’t work like they are supposed to. And they’re expensive

On another note, I am looking forward to the air show here in March. Other than that, I just hope I pass all my classes. Here at work I don’t have much exciting things to do these days. So slowww. I need some new hobbies or something. I want to travel more but I have no friends or family that have money or desire to go to far exotic places. Not that San Diego is special but Nathan and Mike took a trip down there. They invited me at the last minute and I have finals so I couldn’t go. Sucks.

I know that nobody ever reads this site but incase you stumble upon it, I took out my car pc. It always had issues and booted very slow. Anyway, I’m going to try blogging again because it was fun to read my old blogs.

I just realized I have thousands of spam comments on my blog. Funny. I am almost done with the semester. It has been a long and hard one. Breakups, senior project and long days at work have plagued these 4 months. On a good note, I have adjusted well to life in my first own “home”. I enjoy having it and I love my kitchen, although it would be nicer to have Daphne and Duplo here for companionship. Alex is doing well living on his own for the first time, but he is sorta messy in the kitchen. I can’t blame him though. He’ll learn.

Right now I don’t have much to look forward to. I guess graduation, but that is still a year or two away. It really isn’t that long away, but somehow when you’re staring at it in the face the farther away it seems. I read through my old blogs and realized that I was pretty fucked up from 18-20. Now that I’m 24 I feel like I’ve grown up a lot. Hopefully when I am 30 I’ll think that being 24 was a joke as well. I want to get a new car but GTI is doing well for now– I just spent $850 to get the timing belt and water pump and stuff changed out at 80k miles. I think I’m just tired of it and want something new and fresh. I’ve had it 4 years already. If I got a new car I would probably just miss the GTI.

Wordpress is pretty cool. It even spell-checks.

Ok, sorry to not update, but I’ve been very busy with school non-stop for the past few weeks. Let me summarize what I’ve been doing since my last post.

My old 1ghz Athlon PC was not working very well. It was so old it had issues with hibernating and waking up. Also it took up a large portion of my trunk so I went ahead and bought a Mini ITX 1.2ghz Via EPIA MII 12000. :) Boy was that a lot better. Inside of the trunk there is a bracket that is intended for use with a factory CD changer. I ended up taking a sheet of plastic I bought from a local school supply store and cut it to fit inside the bracket. Then I drilled 4 holes and mounted my new motherboard on it. It fits very tight, but works. I would suggest a NanoITX board if you have enough money. Now on to the radio.

Anyway, so I also went out and purchased a Griffin RadioSHARK from our local geek supply store, www.x-tremegeek.com. The store is excellent and if you are ever in the Sacramento area I suggest visiting. I do NOT recommend purchasing the RadioSHARK. It is an excellent USB radio device for any home or office desk, but it is HORRIBLE for cars. It got horrible reception in the car so I thought I could wire an external antenna to it. I went to Circuit City and the guys in the radio shop sold me a Motorola to 2002+ Euro antenna adapter. I cut the motorola part off and soldered a mono 1/8″ male connector + wire to the end. On the RadioSHARK, theres tutorials online that tell you how to wire a 1/8″ jack on the back of your RadioSHARK to extend the antenna. Once again, it worked, but only if stationary (and you have to move around the cable to get reception). In the car I connected it all up and it would not work at all.

So for the last two weeks I had no radio. I commute around 65 miles a day in slowwwww traffic so after awhile the iPod gets boring. Also I love listening to Rob, Arnie and Dawn in the morning, so I went ahead and purchased the HQCT from mp3car.com. I got it last night and created a cable by disassembling an old 486 with serial cables to create a 5×2 header cable. I also went on Crutchfield.com and ordered a Euro-Motorola antenna adapter (again), two 10′ Motorola Antenna extension cables, and one Motorola->Euro adapter to connect to the HQCT. I mounted the HQCT in the trunk along with some other new extension cables I got on ebay. A few minutes ago I turned it on and the HQCT automatically worked! It is AWESOME. Works so much better.

Oh and one last thing. I got a new skin for RoadRunner. It is called Freedom 2.1 made by CdRsKuLL. You can get it on the FreeDrive website. It uses Macromedia Flash and it is very slick looking. Works great. I’ll try to post pictures when I have time, but for now check out the links in this last post and good luck to those that want to follow!

Yesterday morning I hooked up the PC that I am going to put in my car. My brother Mikey gave me an old ATX case. It had no hard drive mounts inside so I built one out of balsa for the HDD and mounted the M2-ATX on top of it. I don’t have pictures right now but I’ll get some of the final product soon. We then ran the cable through the firewall as the tutorial on vwvortex says to do (the plastic box below the windshield wiper motor). We merely drilled a hole the exact size as the cable we were running from the battery and plugged it with some glue. It drops the wire almost right into the driver pedal area. I also built a fuse tap to power the lilliput and also my ignition wire. We ran the power and ignition wire down the driver side door into the back of the car by the monsoon. We then completely disassembled the dash and I put the new screen into place. Boy does it look good. :D After a few trips to Longs for electrical tape and Walmart for the right vga extender at 2am(thank god they are both 24 hours), we ran the USB and VGA cable on the passenger side and buttoned the car back up. Everything worked out great so far. I still don’t know how I’m going to mount the case inside the trunk but I think velcro would work…. Sorry for no pictures but I’ll get them later!

School started today so I don’t have very much time to work on the bezel. Here’s a picture of its just-about-finished state. All I need to do now is paint it the final color and clearcoat over it for protection.

I decided to test fit the LCD screen inside of the bezel and radio cage. Fits pretty well. Here’s a pic:

I think I’m done for the night. Tomorrow I shall figure out how to mount the LCD’s PCB and the Bezel to the radio cage.

Last night I started really sanding the bezel. The epoxy I used is not as hard as I thought it would be, even after 36 hours of curing. After a bit of sanding the epoxy here’s what it looked like:

I went ahead and bought some black primer and some bondo spot putty. So far its been working excellent. After using some primer and sanding some more here’s what it looked like:

I re-measured the monsoon height and began cutting the bottom of the original bezel off using an exacto knife with saw attachment. It was taking a really long time and I started to get sloppy and ended up jabbing my finger pretty deep. After 20 minutes with the exacto knife I got only an inch deep on the bezel. Here’s a picture of my hurt finger and the small amount of cutting I did:

All I have left on the bezel is fabricating a way to make it stay in the dash and creating a very smooth fine finish on it. Here’s a picture of the almost-completed test fit.

So last night I hooked up my touch screen and got all the software working.  It is amazing how much free software there is.  I am debating on whether I want to spend 199 on StreetDeck when free software such as RoadRunner does such a great job.  Here’s a video of me playing around with it.  The GPS doesnt work entirely because I dont have one hooked up to the pc yet. 

So I started sanding my bezel, which isnt turning out too great.  I think the epoxy isnt very sandable and its flaking everywhere.  I’m going to buy some bondo and black primer to try to get it to be more smooth.  Hopefully that works out better than this. It is going to be a lot of work…

So I’ve accumulated more parts!  Here’s whats new:

• Amp wiring kit to wire the M2-ATX
• Remaining parts for monsoon-pc box
• Epoxy, black paint and wood!
• 12v wire tap for lilliput power adapter
• Sandpaper..

Only few things I can think of are tools and VGA/USB extenders.  Perhaps some thicker gauge wire to run extra power around incase I need it.

So while I was waiting for my Lilliput screen and extra bezel, I went ahead and built a wood frame to see what it would look like in my radio cage.  Here’s a picture of that:

I also added little tabs on the back side of the bezel to make it fit into a groove that the radio cage has.  Here’s a picture of the tabs and what it looks like inside the cage.

The yellow stuff is Aliphatic Resin (aka wood glue by GreatPlanes…used in RC plane building.  Good stuff.  Also easily sandable)

So finally I got my lilliput in. Here’s a picture of the box and a picture of the replacement bezel.

I got a little excited and decided to test fit the bezel.  Looks like it is a bit too tall and a bit too narrow.  If I added a bit on the sides and chopped the bottom off, it still wouldn’t look right because the screen wouldnt be centered in the frame, so I chopped a lot of the bottom off and added some extra wood on the sides.  I didn’t get a clear shot of this but here’s a shot of the wood glued to the side of the bezel.

Now I got some epoxy (the stuff you mix together) and some black paint.  I dabbed some and put it inside these little cups and stirred until solid, then started sloppily filling in the voids between the bezel and the wood.  Here’s a picture of where I’m at right now:

 I’m gonna finish this off and let it dry for a day, then come back and sand it.

Hello! I’ve read posts about people starting their own ‘iTunes’ mods but I havent found one that actually works so I started building my own! So far it allows you to play single songs and control the volume of iTunes through StreetDeck!

It also works with iPods! Now you can navigate your ipod and listen to the music.

Anyway, I would love feedback on this so far. Here’s a link to download it: http://www.pogi.org/iTunes.sdz

For some reason it renames it to iTunes.zip, so just rename it back to iTunes.sdz and it works fine. Also make sure you have the latest iTunes installed. If you connect your ipod while you have the mod loaded, go back to the first screen in the mod and just click the mod’s back button(NOTthe button on the top) to refresh your sources. Your ipod should then show up.

This is just an initial release, as I do not own StreetDeck.  Anybody want to buy me a full version or paypal me some money so I can purchase a full version?

Below are some screenshots.

Hello! This is my new website/blog.  I’ve been playing with WordPress and it seems pretty neat.  I mainly changed this so I can start working on my worklog for my Car PC.  I have a 2003 Volkswagen GTI 1.8T, 5-speed, in Silverstone Gray.  My goal is to integrate a computer navigation/mp3 player into my dashboard.  Currently I have the stock monsoon system. 

 I want it to go from this:

To this:

(judoGTI’s wonderful install.  I will build my own bezel.)

Fabrication wise, I’m going to build a custom bezel out of wood/resin/epoxy/fiberglass and a replacement LCD bezel.  I’m still experimenting on how I am going to do this.  I would like it to be reproducable w/ some casting resin and a mold so that I can give it to others as well (they can mount the LCD inside themselves and paint it).

 Here’s what I have “collected” so far:

• 7″ Lilliput 629 Touch Screen LCD w/ extra bezel
• M2-ATX 160 Watt Power Supply
• Parts to build a monsoon-integration box(+5/6V on inputs)
• Replacement Radio Cage for MKIV
• Monsoon wire harness
• 1ghz Athlon Thunderbird (might replace later with a VIA EPIA…)

I also have a tv tuner/radio card that I’m planning on using my radio with.  I’m still researching/reading about how to connect my antenna to this.  For software, I really really like StreetDeck but its so expensive that I might stick with RoadRunner. I also have a USB GPS on the way that will hopefully work with FreeDrive.  I already got the “maps” for my area.  Any other software suggestions?