Hi, my name is Robert Ray from MP3 Car. We get a ton of emails from people like you that
want to know how to build a car PC. So I decided that we would film on an HD so you could pause,
go back and forth and learn how to build one of these things yourself. So we're going to
build one of our telematics bundles which is designed to be highly ruggedized. It's not,
it doesn't have the cheapest parts in the world but it's a great bundle and a great way to learn,
great way to start. So let's head on into the lab and take a look. Alright, let's start with the
parts list. We have a Morex 5677 case here which is powder coated. I've got it on a little bit of
cloth here to protect it from getting scratched in case we decide to do a cosmetic install. We've
got a dual core Intel Atom motherboard which we've been very pleased with the performance on. It
has four USB ports on the back, ethernet, great quality sound. It has a sound header inside if
you need to do any audio there. It has a serial port if you ever want to connect any serial type
of telematics equipment or any other type of interface device and a VGA port. So that's,
that's a great set of input output for a telematics bundle. We have a cable kit and this
cable kit is standard ATX power, 12 volt and 5 volt for any type of an accessory. A P4 connector
which is going to connect right here on the motherboard to provide 12 volts of power right
to the motherboard. And then we have these three wires right here which are ground positive and
the white one is for accessory for switching the accessory wire. We also have a little jumper kit
and what you use these jumpers for are setting the on off timing sequences on the M2 ATX power
supply. So before we forget, I'm just going to go ahead and put this in right here for standard
configuration is just having it on the A jumper. So now that we've got that out of the way. Today's
install we're building a telematics bundle and this is a Seagate automotive grade hard drive,
very rugged and can do all sorts of shock and temperature extremes. So on our telematics
bundles that's what we use. M2 ATX power supply, this takes the noisy car voltage and turns it
into clean regulated computer voltage as well as controlling the ignition sensing on and off. So
when you turn your car off it's going to tell the computer to turn off in a graceful manner rather
than causing a hard shutdown. So that's what the M2 ATX does. Of course we have a memory stick,
this case we're going to use a two gig memory stick. The sticker that's going to go on to describe
all of the ports is underneath and we're also going to add four extra USB ports. So this case
comes with this motherboard comes with four ports but there's a lot of situations where four is
just not enough and and using hubs can get quite unstable when you turn when you're turning the
computer on and off and you just want devices to work without any keyboard input. It adds a lot
of stability to have non-hubbed USB ports and you also get a full 500 milliamps of power out of each
one of these things. We have a back plate which we're going to modify in a little bit here and a
two and a half inch hard drive to standard IDE connector which plugs in here when we get a little
bit further into the install. So I think the first thing we're going to start out with here is
because we're adding these extra USB ports we need to mark the back plate for the additional
holes which are going to hold the USB ports. So I'm going to mark this right here right about in
the center of that and right about in the center of that and then we're going to drill those so
that we have plenty of space for the USB ports. One of the things that makes it easier when drilling
is to use an awl or some other type of sharp device to score the metal where you want to start
the drilling and so that's what I've done here. So the back plate connector is now scored with our
new holes and what we're going to do is quickly fish these things through the grommets ahead of
time. It'll save us a little bit of some time fishing this stuff through. It's rather close
fit just because you don't want a lot of play and room for dust and other things to get in so it's
pretty tight fit where you really want to squeeze these connectors through ahead of time. So these
go through our new hole leaving the connectors on the outside obviously of the plate. You can put
this plate on only one way. You've got this little metal piece here so you can only put that plate
on one way. So that gets mounted there. We'll do another one right over here.
Alright so now we have installed four more USB ports and we'll just set this aside over here for
right now. In this case there are two screws on each side and three screws on the back so I
think we'll fast forward here so that you don't have to be bored with screw openings. Next piece
to come out is the hard drive bracket. We're going to install the hard drive here and reinstall this
in a few minutes after we put the hard drive in here. There's four screws on the top.
The easiest way to do this hard drive is to first of all you want to make sure that you put
the connectors facing out on this side. Pin one is here but you want the connectors to be facing
out so that you have plenty of room to get your cable in and then you want to use find some type
of a surface to put this on. I'm going to use a spare case here. You really in general wouldn't
want to use one of these cases to avoid scratching it but I happen to have a spare one here on the
bench and then we're going to use our screw kit that came with the case to screw in the hard drive.
Now it's time to go ahead and mount this motherboard so let's do that. Before we do the
motherboard of course we have to put in our back plate so the PS2 connectors if you decide to use
them go over near this red power switch. Okay we're going to pull these out just to give me
plenty of room to get the motherboard in here. It's a very very tight fit to get the motherboard
in. We have about a millimeter to spare so this is one of those things where you just have to
be patient when you go to install this. Take your time. Make sure everything is lined up.
Just slowly push this thing into place and it should just fall right in. So this plastic plate
holds the motherboard out an extra millimeter or so. So the first screw is a little tricky. Find
something sturdy on the board. I'm going to use this PCI slot to help hold it in place and help
the whole line up. You can use a magnetic screwdriver. This one happens to be non-magnetic to screw
your screw in. The first one's the hardest just because of this pressure to align the holes. I'm
going to use this printer port now to align this hole. One of the important things with using pushing
on the back of these ports to keep things aligned is there's a bunch of pins here and you really
don't want to push on them. They're really sensitive so you want to find something rigid to push on
like this plastic that's actually attached to the motherboard in order to align the holes.
Alright, so we have two more screws. One here and one here. While we're at it,
we're going to go ahead and plug in our case fan right now into the motherboard header. Now it's
time to go ahead and put our power supply in. So before we do this, just to make threading a
little bit easier, I am going to reinstall the power cables. Positive goes on the outside, the
white which is for the switch goes in the center, and the black goes on this side. So I'm also going
to put the P4 connector on right now just to avoid torquing the board. This board for some
reason or another was designed with only two screws, mainly because that's what most cases
take, but it doesn't leave a lot of support when you go to apply pressure to install the
connector. So I'm going to install this right here on the bench ahead of time. And the other
thing that we want to install, might as well just do it right now, is our LED connectors. So these
are polarity sensitive. So I'm going to put these on in the right order. Plus being here, minus
being that way. And the other thing we're going to need, might as well hook up this case switch. So
if we ever wanted to manually switch it, most of the time it's going to be controlled by the
ignition, which is this wire. But if we ever wanted to manually switch it, we're going to have this
case switch hooked up. Car computers of course never crash. I'm joking of course, but you could
use that switch to do a hard power off if you needed to. So before we stuff this in here,
we're going to want to fish our wires through here. I did this first because these are heavy duty
wires. And to bend this gauge of wire is a little bit tricky after it's already been put in place.
So you have about two inches to spare. I just curl it up and slide it in. We are ready to go.
And one of the things to do here is if you don't have a magnetic screwdriver, just put your screw
in here first into the hole. So that way when you get this lined up, you don't have to try and
use a pair of needle nose pliers or some other type of the Rolex just to get your power supply
screw in. The other one. If you had an amplifier in your car, an external amplifier in your car
that you wanted to control, you would use this red pin right here to control the amp power on
and off. So we happen to have a 10 by 2 ATX connector here and that gets plugged into this
side of the board. We're not using a 12 pin ATX connector and it's not going to hurt anything
with this install. We're going to install our P4 12 volt connector which provides extra 12
power to the motherboard. Now that we've got everything installed, plugged in out of the way,
we are going to put our 2 gigabyte memory slot in here. Oh, of course we have to put it in the
right direction. That's why they make these things notched and foolproof. So that's a good
lesson where if you don't want to push those things in too hard, it should relatively easily
snap in place and if it doesn't triple check before you get nuts and break something. So now
we can continue to fish these extra USB ports through. I'm going to line them up so they look
nice on the outside here and power goes towards the back plate which is the red wire. So we have
one done. You're done. All right. So it makes for a slightly cluttered back plate but the nice
thing is you have all your connectors on one spot. You can mount this underneath the seat and all
the cables come out one side of the device. Okay. So now the next step is to wrap up the
cable. All right. So now it's time to put in our hard drive connector. Before we do that,
let's put the power connector in first. So again, the red pin, the red pin one goes over
close to these headers which let you select whether it's a master or a slave drive. We're
going to put it in cable select mode. It's easy. We only have one drive. Power goes on this far
end. We drop that in place. Before we do that, we need to make sure that we plug it into the
motherboard. Otherwise, we're going to have some booting problems later. Alrighty. Put the screw
in here. Double check everything. Make sure all of our connectors are tight. And we have built
ourselves a car computer. So in case someone forgets what these connectors are, I just decided to
take the free stickers that Intel gives us and stick them on the back. It labels all the ports
and connectors and everything like that. Strip the ends and now we're really done.
