My In-Dash Car PC project

I'm enjoying reading your thread and may be able to contribute. I take it your PC has conventional ATX-type power supply that's powered off an inverter in the car? If you can't ever get it to lock up in the house, I'd say it can't be a software problem exclusively. Sounds like the only difference between inside and in the car is how you're powering the computer. Your power out of the inverter may be causing just enough noise to get through your computer power supply and causing bit errors which when occurring in the wrong place definitely will lock up a computer. Noise problems are usually inconsistent too which fits your situation.

The normal fix for noise on the 12 volt power is an iron core inductor (choke) between the battery/fuse and the 12 volt input to the device being powered. The size of the inductor depends on how bad the noise is, but it must be rated for the current you're trying to draw. The worse the noise the more inductance you will need.

Hope that helps.

 

That electrical noise comment reminded me of a problem i had with grounding on my car pc. It turned out that the pc ground was about at about 1V higher relative to the car chassis. I ended up installing a ground wire from one of the motherboard fasteners to the car chassis. Fortunately I didn't incur the wrath of the ground loop gods. Not sure why such a thing would start up all of a sudden for you, but it's easy to check for, just take a volt meter and measure between one of the motherboard screws and your car. If you do find that there is a reading, think very carefully on what you want to do next. I'd hate for you to connect a jumper wire inadvertently release the magic smoke...

A couple of other things to look at... check your heat sinks to make sure they're in contact with the chips they're cooling. swap out your power supply with one that you know is good. I've had desktops that had the same behavior as what you've described. The initial bootup of windows is quite energy intensive and if your supply is marginal or failing you'll see errors and lockups.

-m

 

The inverter idea is a good one, at least for trying an alternative method for verifying the power supply idea. Since the inverter generates a pseudo sine wave for AC power, it will act as a filter. Direstraits has a good idea there, though-- a spark-suppressor type choke should filter out most noise on the DC line, if there is any. Momanz' ground issue is also a good thing to check out... grounding in cars can be pretty messy-- I had a chassis ground problem in a Ford that was entirely dependent upon a single 18ga wire that had corroded.

 

One more thing I thought of during my morning coffee. Check the electrolytic capacitors on your motherboard. There was a period of time where motherboard makers were using substandard caps in their products and that lead to no end of stability issues for people (myself included). What your looking for is bulging or leaking ones. Google any you'll find plenty of info on this as it was a pretty big problem a couple of years ago. The solution is to replace the caps yourself, not terribly difficult but requires some skill with a soldering iron or buy a new motherboard. While you're at it check your powersupply too.

-momanz

 

My 2 cents, if we talk about grounding, I never rely on "chassis " connections, if for an instance you take a look to the Prius electrical schematic and internal wiring, you will see a redundancy of chassis tie points all over, indicating that the ground potential of "chassis" is unreliable.
Since all my electrical additions in my 2004, including a Carputer in 2006, my electrical distribution consist of a very flexible heavy 4 ga positive lead and a sister 4ga ground wire , from the battery to 2 distribution blocks under the passenger seat, providing juice to some gear, never connected to "chassis" crap.
Next I will look into your internal upgraded power supply, these are prone to electrical surges and certain voltages (3.3V and lower mainly) do crash momentarily, hanging your CPU.

 

And does that go through a regulator? i.e you have it hooked up to +12V, and before it hits your mobo - is it going through a regulator?

If not - you've got a real problem, and are supplying too much voltage to the system. Normally, when a battery charges, the charging circuitry supplies +14-15V, too much for an unregulated circuit. You may also be seeing voltage spikes and momentary brownouts, as you power on/off various things in the vehicle.

If it IS regulated, then I'd say you'd have to pass it through a pretty good sized electrolytic capacitor, to suppress the noise generated by all the various vehicle components, that are being fed into your system.

Either that, or get a specific power supply made to supply an ATX mobo, that runs off of 12VDC. This may be the better route to go, in the long run.

 

This one may be tough. I assume by "safe mode" you are talking about Windoze safe mode?

This is apparently not a heat problem (normally, I'd say it's bad memory, but since it works fine when warm...). Since it does not show itself when running in safe mode, you need to figure out what's loaded/configured when in safe mode, and not, then start the process of elimination.

• Is your screen res the same in safe mode and not?
• Are you in "networked" safe mode or not?
• How about just unloading the various drivers, etc. (network, sound, etc), and then ignoring the "found new hardware" whining and see what's going if it still locks up.
• Also - have you made sure you have the latest drivers, especially display drivers? Historically, this is the cause of the majority of Windoze lock-ups.

 

Actually, that is a good suggestion. Force, try running memtest86+ for a good six hours or so. If you get any errors, then you likely do have a hidden RAM issue.

 

What do you use wifi in the car for?

 

Gotcha... I have an extra laptop motherboard of a sudden, I'm thinking of getting a car charger for it and installing it in my Prius. Wifi antennas might be a tad problematic, considering it's got an internal wifi card on it.

I have a touch-display from an earlier project to use in lieu of the actual laptop display. Now all I need to do is build an interface between the laptop and the stock stereo so I could play all my music.

 

Good job in that in-dash car PC project. It definitely is a good idea to have a PC in your car.

__________________
save gas

 

You sir, (theForce)

Are my new (prius) hero. I havent read the entire thread yet but I skimmed through and plan to go back and re-read each message but from the looks of it, you did a dang good job. Congrats and if you ever come to LA we'll have to have a meetup because I would defintely like to check that out in person.

Sometimes I wish I didnt get the extended warranty on my Prius so I could do things like this haha. But, just for kicks, would this work with a '08 Prius?