Ok it's only a small mod in the big scheme of things

I finally got bored of listening to my Burt Bahcarach tape collection so decided it was time to fix the CD

Step one, take it apart


Step 2, apply


result


Spot the world exclusive bit yet


Anyway, moving on
The drivers side speaker has always sounded a bit quieter than the others. And after 14 years all are passed their best. It also just so happens I had a spare set of 160mm(6 1/2") speakers sitting about

The stock Toyots speakers are 160mm cones but have an unfeasibly large metal surround taking them to about 8" in size
I was going to need either spacers or ingenuity

Being a confirmed cheapsk......er practical fellow I went for ingenious

Take one stock set of speakers and apply varoius destructive devices


Apply medium sized hammer


Et voila, a perfect spacer..


I also chose this route for genuine HiFi reasons. The stock speaker is somewhat sealed to the doorcard making the doorcard the front baffle of the speaker and creating a much longer path from front to rear of the cone. The result should be reasonable bass
If this seal is broken (as it will be if the stock speaker surrounds are not used or some ingenuity is not applied to new speakers) then audio quality will suffer


And the world exclusie part I hear folks cry?


Well, I've certainly never ever seen this capability with the stock Toyota headunits


Sound quality is actually remarkably good. Them Toyota bods knew how to design a pretty good system

Arise poor lowly pictureless thread mwuhahahahaahhaahhaaahahaaaahahahahah


There has now been another slight upgrade




[rolf harris]

Can you tell what it is yet kids?

[/rolf]






Maybe there's a clue round the back?






Eh?

Wassat plugged in there then


There's been a bit of internal Modification - the CD player was dead anyway lol




All of which results in this




I'm still working on it at the moment - hence the really shabby interior wiring to power it up

Eventually I'll splice back in the stock Toyota interconnect to the main head unit. This will then give me sounds via the stock HU

Spec so far
Via pico-itx
1GB RAM
160GB HDD
M3-ATX vehicle specific PSU
Wireless N networking
Bluetooth
Logitech Dinovo mini KB
No display
Currently running windoze 7 as the OS
Tunage provided by MPXPLAY under a dos shell

I plan to run it headless day to day and plug in a screen only when needed
In this role it will just be a gurtnormous jukebox. I like MPXPLAY for this as it has album skip functions as well as the usual track skip

I need to do some work on the OS yet. I tried freedos which meant power on -> music time of <10 seconds including POST. Have mucked about a bit with nGhost/OpenIce/LinuxIce which shows promise but is currently a little lacking

However with Win7 and hibernating on car switch off (The M3 has a remote switch on/off capability to auto hibernate the motherboard when the car is turned off) it boots in roughly 20 seconds which is just about doable for me.

I think I'll end up dual booting freedos with Win7 and possibly other OSes via external flash disks

Wow, that is small. I like that a lot

Looks like the I/O board could do with a bit of tidying too. Hows about mounting the screen in the glovebox?

_________________
JP
GT4DC Treasurer

Grey St185 RC
Silver BMW E46 M3
Multicolour yawn Honda VFR400
Silver Honda Civic Type-R

The i/o board is just vestigial until i scroinge op the right connectors lol

I'm thinking sunvisor for the display but it depends what comes along cheap

Small?.....all I can see is a whopping big Dell monitor. Would be a problem mounting that on the sunvisor

_________________
Don
GT4DC Chairman
1994 Toyota Celica GT-Four ST205WRC JDM 269bhp @ 0.9bar
1994 Toyota Celica GT-Four Special GT 590bhp @ 1.8bar
1989 Van Diemen RF88/89 Formula Ford 1600
2008 Nissan Patrol GU 3.0L ZD30DDTi 154bhp

Mr BIN strikes again
You need one of these:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/in-car-monitor-for-head-rest-or-dash-not-used_W0QQitemZ280411349979QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Audio_TV_Electronics_In_Car_Entertainment_GPS_In_Car_Audio_Players_PP?hash=item4149d1a3db
So when you hooking up the MOTEC and sensors to it then?

_________________
Vice Chairman
1990 White UK Celica ST185 - Project DTM
1997 Cream BMW R1200C (as seen in James Bond "Tomorrow Never Dies")
2005 Jaguar X-type 3.0 Sovereign AWD Automatic
Blood Bikes - https://www.freewheelers.org.uk/

ooh, nearly right but it needs vga input at the motherboard doesn't do composite

I want one

_________________
ST185 CS #1845

Very nice, that's talent

_________________
'92 GT-Four RC - Project Rufus - something of a mover.
'05 Audi A3 3.2 V6 Quattro S Line - not bad for a daily.

Don't encourage him

_________________
Vice Chairman
1990 White UK Celica ST185 - Project DTM
1997 Cream BMW R1200C (as seen in James Bond "Tomorrow Never Dies")
2005 Jaguar X-type 3.0 Sovereign AWD Automatic
Blood Bikes - https://www.freewheelers.org.uk/

OI!

I had to be good for something lol

Current spec :-

Hardware as before

Software tri-boot setup in the words largest outbreak of bet hedging since Hedgestock back in '76

1) Default is Freedos running mpxplay. Power on -> Music in <10 seconds which isn't much worse than my kenwood HU. Play control via wired remote control (£5.00 usb keypad) which I'll eventually wire in to the front buttons on the CD. No display!
Running on 1 100GB partition dedicated to music storage currently full of 156 hours worth with about 90GB free space lol

2) Windows 7 tiny edition. Power on -> desktop ~45 seconds

3) Ubuntu 9.04 running minimum service setup, power on->desktop ready ~45 seconds just like windows

I've had a bit of a play with the latest revisions of CoPilot powerFC software which looks OK and provides a nice array of gauges to look at. What I'm hoping for is a "live" map capability but I've not tested that out yet

Still haven't connected up the headunit cable so it's still a bit messy and looks exactly the same as the last pictures. Also remembered I need to fit the serial port somewhere so I can plug in the powerFC since that was kind of the biggest reason for the project

I started a dos logger program for the powerFC so it collects data even when playing music but illness slowed me up somewhat and progress has been minimal

So will you be making more and how much... lol

LOL! Only you could turn my old double DIN stereo in to a flaming PC Steve Hope H is still running ok?

Cheers,
Mark

_________________
Mark - 94 Red Jap ST205 WRC - Gone but not forgotten
'06 Blue Merc E320 CDi v6
'89 Mica Blue MR2 Mk1b restoration project
"Don't make me come over there"

Hi Mark,
I see your sig has changed from C43 AMG to CLK55 AMG Nice, very nice indeed. Another car that was on my short list

Hope you are keeping well m8.

I think Steve had to do something as was getting a bit OTT to only listening to Marillion & Burty Bacharach

_________________
JP
GT4DC Treasurer

Grey St185 RC
Silver BMW E46 M3
Multicolour yawn Honda VFR400
Silver Honda Civic Type-R

clk55, right up there on the cars I want list you git

I want to do something that allows onboard ecu programming - it seemed the obvious thing to do to me lol

Progress currently stalled on that front while I figure out urbs for the USB stack