My friend and I have been working on installing the usual round of car audio equipment into his new Prius. For us this has included a computer with a touchscreen LCD monitor amongst various amplifiers and speaker replacements. Now that the amps and speakers were finished, for now we proceeded to install the screen into the dash, and after about 8 hours of pulling the dash apart, messing with the mounting brackets and plastic covers, we finally managed to make it all work!
Some pics of the screen in action, it was dark by the time we finished, so pictures aren't that great:
Closed:
Opening:
(it's a spring loaded mechanical design, not motorized)
Open:
The computer itself sits right under the driver's seat. Next project will be to implement a double pole relay that will switch the input of the JBL amp from the headunit to the computer.
We also discovered that there is considerable space under the screen, possibly enough to install a laptop slotloading CD/DVD ROM drive there (and even appears to have mounting holes on the bottom) but we're also thinking about trying to put a USB hub there, it seems like it could have included some USB ports on the front since the interface is USB for the touchscreen.
I'll take some better photos of the rest of the "works" and post them up in a bit.
Right now everything is in revision 1 stages, meaning we've made a lot of guesses as far as what would be suitable for the setup, but later finding out that we needed to change things around a bit, so the end result is that some of the installations are a bit on the messy side, until we re-do and finalize everything to make it neat and tidy.
Some obstacles we are facing is the heat generated by the amps needs to be vented, so for now the cover for the hidden compartment is removed to allow for air to circulate, but in the future we may construct a new cover that includes vents and / or fans to circulate the air. Time to start learning how to fiberglass!
Our first efforts were in a Chrysler K car, you can check out the first revision (mostly pre-touchscreen, but includes some photos of the screen we eventually installed) here:
http://thiscar.doesntexist.com
And some photos of the early revisions of the computer in the Nissan Sentra here:
http://presto.homeftp.net:8080/sentra