Hello all, soon this summer will be my birthday and I would like to make my self a *cool* present. I'm a computer science student, last year, and I always liked embedded computers and modding.
I want to buy an x86 computer, to put it in my car and play around with it. For sure you know much better than me, so I'm going to ask you what you think will better fit a car computer.
I've seen around all pico/nano/mini ITX that range from 600mhz to
1400mhz. I believe that as long as they can play video (even via hardware) it doesn't matter the power, since to browse the internet, play mp3s, etc, computing power is not really a big deal. The prices are all between 100$ and 400$. I'm not even sure dimension matters as if it doesn't fit in the box (don't know the name, the one used for documents in front of the passenger) I could always put it in luggage van.The car for now is a new beatle cabrio, but if I have to change car I would like to be able to do that without too much hassle.
I also seen the mac mini and apple tv that are both really small and probably enough for the type of application I'm forseeing. The power managment would probably be the problem.
I'm not sure on the OS i'm going to use, but most probably one of the flavour of *nix, even osx. The IO will be a screen (not sure but most probably touchscreen, vga or svideo), a gps, a gprs/umts/whatever for Internet access and WIFI + bluetooth. For wifi I would even like to put a bigger antenna than normal.
Do you have any suggestion what-so-ever for the type of project I'm considering ? Places to buy, components, anything! :D
Thanks in advance, and sorry for cross-posting but I couldn't find a group that was only about car computer.