Car PC, Part 2: The Mini-ITX PC

This is the second article in a multipart Car PC project. The first part addressed the installation of the Car2PC interface module that links a USB-based system to the audio head unit that is typically a radio/CD player combination. The initial testing was done using a laptop PC. This next step will use a Mini-ITX-based PC with a motherboard supplied by ITOX.

Building a PC for the automotive environment is not as simple as it sounds. The environment is significantly more rugged than an office environment. Power is not as clean and wiring can be a royal pain.

Being relatively new to this type of design I took advantage of the expertise of one of our suppliers, Logic Supply. My interview with Scott Hayden, Sales Director for Logic Supply, covers some of the areas that Logic Supply addresses as well as the kinds of support they can provide designers.

Logic Supply's support was very helpful. I made the usual mistakes, like wanting to use a conventional power supply, which does not work in an automotive environment. Logic Supply was able to help in this area, describing their M2-ATX power supply, which I used in the project. It meshes perfectly with the CarTFT VoomPC case also provided by Logic Supply.

Logic Supply can handle all your Mini-ITX needs, including motherboards, but we turned to ITOX, an industrial motherboard company, who suggested their G4M100-MS12 motherboard for the project. ITOX can provide technical support for embedded designs like this project as well, although their case selections do not target the automotive space. The Celeron-based G4M100-MS12 is comparable to the Intel-based Mini-ITX boards available from Logic Supply. Likewise, ITOX has a wide range of motherboards that can provide cooler systems with less performance or systems with higher performance processors.

This system does not include lots of hardware. The two other main components are Seagate's 160-Gbyte Momentus 5400.3 SATA drive. It gets its capacity courtesy of perpendicular recording. The other component is a pair of 400-MHz DDR PC3200 SDRAM modules from Crucial Technology.

Each of the products used in this project have individual reviews so you can check out the details in those articles. The rest of this article addresses the construction of the system. The next article in this series will add a GPS receiver and a complete Windows-based automotive navigation system.