• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Best front end for Car PC?

N

nst6563

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 15, 2003
Messages
4,023
I'm helping a friend put a 3.06Ghz P4 carpc system together, and we've just about got everything but are a bit tossed on the front end now. We were going with Media Engine, and I even made a custom skin for it. But the XM portion locks up in Media Engine, so we're trying to use an external app for that as well as the GPS software.

So....anyone with some insight wanna shoot some suggestions our way?

btw, the carputer is going into a 2005 Mustang GT. Mini-ITX P4 3.06Ghz, 1Gb ram, 60gb hdd, 1gb flash disk (will be booting windows from this in the future), intelligent power controller, 200w DC-DC psu, 7.5" touchscreen. No pics yet, but there'll be plenty in the near future.

thx
 
I personally have used all of them. Centrafuse is by far the most indepth, next comes Road Runner, then Frodo Player. The rest are good but not as good as the 3 just mentioned.

As someone else said, several people are using Meedio Essentials now, but it is not specifically for CarPC use, so you may find that it is lacking in many areas.

Anyway, I personally recommend Centrafuse, it is my current favorite one. A newer version of it (1.3) is about to be released at the end of this month, and it is going to be awesome, however I still recommend the current version 1.2.

Also, as someone else recommend, check out www.mp3car.com, also you can hop on efnet and get in on #mp3car for live chat, though it's been pretty dead for hte past few years. The forums get way more traffic.
 
Thanks for those...I like the Centrafuse look, but does it also do XM??

What he's looking for is the following:
MP3 support
Playlists
Movies
FM
XM
GPS
BlueTooth phone control (if possible).

I saw most of those in Centrafuse, but didn't see XM support. I just took a quick look, so I'll look more in depth when I have some more time. Unfortunately, I have to get back to work :mad:
 
XM Radio is in the works, however not integrated yet into Centrafuse.

Mediacar has stopped development, there are several developers who have taken on the task of creating a "new" mediacar, notably Frodoplayer and Road Runner (which really is a clone of mediacar, but it's open source).

FP and RR both have XM radio support, I recommend RoadRunner next to Centrafuse. There is pretty steady development on RR, whereas FP development has slowed down due to him re-doing a LOT of what FP is based on. In other words, he is re-writing completely.

Good luck!
 
I think we'll check out Roadrunner when we get it all up and running then.

a little off topic, but should a 200w DC-DC PSU be able to power a 3.06Ghz P4 w/1Gb ram + hdd??? They advertise the 200w psu to work with P4 boards, but ours won't post with it. If I hook the system up to a normal ATX psu, it works fine. On the DC-DC 200w, the system turns on, fans spin...but doesn't go any further.

btw...thanks for the replies and heads up on Centrafuse + XM
 
Running windows from flash is a bad idea. There is a limit to the rewrites you can do in flash, thats why you don't see them sold as normal hdds yet. Windows page filing may kill the flash card in a matter of days.
 
yeah, I read up on the flash thing. We decided to just go with the hard drive for now. Good thing my friend has a camera that will take the 1gb flash card :p

btw...figured out the power supply thing too. The Pw200 dc-dc psu's are nothing short of crap. They pass the vehicle's 12v line right on through without any regulation and only derive the 5v, 3.3v and other lines from the 12v. The best thing to get is an Opus 150 or if you have a C158 Travla case from centronics, a better way to go would be with the Carnetix CNXP1900.
 
Actually pretty much all those dc-dc "Power supplies" are not designed for vehicle use (~14v). They are designed for those power bricks that output a (mostly) stable 12v. There are a few places that make car voltage regualtion units for just that problem. Right now, though, I can't seem to locate them. It was some sort of car audio site.

Also, I hear there are some versions of linux that should work ok on flash.
 
ASUS adapter & Dothan... ...or try a P4-M. P4 is the worst choice for a carputer.

Otherwise, sounds like a nice setup. Did not know they had 200w DC-DC PSUs.
 
you should check out carnetix.com and opussolutions.info, they both offer "made for carpc" dc-dc power supplies. carnetix has a brand new unit out the xx1900 or something like that, that supports extra 5v rails for usb hubs, your lcd, etc as well as your pc on the 12v, and of course offers the luxury of auto turn on and shutdown controllers.

hop on to mp3car.com and check out the power supply forum, good talks go on in there.
 
Yea, a normal P4 draws WAY to much power and gets pretty hot. When I riged up a car-puter for a friend, we went out and found an inexspensive laptop (AMD Mobile 1.5GHz processor, 256MB of RAM, and a built in Geforce 5200-Go, 20 GB hard drive) and threw it under the passanger seat with a USB 2.0 external 200GB hard disk pluged into it!

All we had to do from there was plug it into the cars sterio, hook up the touch screen that we had previously mounted in his dashboard and install a front end (Media Engine) :D

BTW, we used a car lighter adpter to plug in the laptops charging cable and the 200GB hard drive. No problems yet!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top