sevin7 wrote:

I am using my eee as a carputer. i have already done the touch screen mod. i want to separate the screen from the computer itself and put it in my dash. here is a little faq from mp3car.com :                                                     
Q: Will the signal be unusable if I make my wire too long?
A: No, the signal will be OK. As long as you keep the INVERTER<>BACKLIGHT cable the original length.

Q: What is an INVERTER and what does it have to do with the above question?
A: Inverter is a small board that usually sits right next to your LCD (inside the LCD casing). It apmlifies the signal coming from your laptop's motherboard into a stronger signal used to power your backlight. The longer you make the cable between the inverter and the backlight the darker your backlight will become. That is why it is important NOT to extend the INVERTER<>BACKLIGHT cable. You can still extend the LAPTOP<>INVERTER cable.


Im not sure where the inverter is located on the EEE. Is the inverter inside of the lcd housing ? if so i wont have any problems. If it is located on the motherboard then this idea will not work. Does anyone know where the inverter is located?

Why dont u use a relatively cheap ts monitor (there's a lot on the bay, eg some 10,4" for less 200$) and so you wont destroy your eee?
That way when you go out of your car you could carry with you your eee just unplugging power, vga and an usb needy for ts and/or and add external hub in your car, example for a powermate and/or dvd player, hd-mp3 archive...

Hwever the inverter is under the lcd.

ciao

Also, you can sometimes find really good deals for adding a touchscreen on ebay.  I have seen them for $50 before.

Eee doesn't have inverter as it has LED back light... ( no need for inverter )
but you can't use long cables on it's screen.. i thing 30 to 40 cm is max..

You could just take the hinges / parts of plastic away and place the base behing the screen?

What kind of results did you get on this?  I had a similar topic and felt that I never had conclusive results and this is a big issue for what I'm planning.  I want to separate the keyboard and touch screen as well and would love to hear from someone that has made it work without a problem.

I don't get why someone couldn't do this. There are, from what I can see, two possible ways to acheive this.
Firstly, extend the ribbon cables attaching the LCD to their controller cards.
Secondly, extend the cables from the controller cards (that goto the motherboard).

The second way seems more 'do-able' as the LCD has to be attached to the motherboard by a single point, all be it not a single wire. I did a similar thing with a 12.1" lcd monitor i have here. It basically takes all its power from its own PCI card which is attached to the motherboard. So it only has one cable for everything. I took the monitor out of its housing, extended the cable by simply clipping them and re-soldering to a box to allow me to have the original length and an extended cable.

I know what jkkmobile is saying though, the length of the cables cannot be of an infinite length as the signal decreases with every mm. I found using the longer cable, the picture became some what fuzzy but soon fixed this by decreasing the length untill it wasn't fuzzy at all.

Try and do what jkk said and 'flip' the unit around to look like a tablet pc, then you have no need to remove the LCD from the unit itself. Will just look like a fat lcd monitor lol.

Good luck

On my end, since I posted this, I've gotten better answers than I expected regarding heat dissipation when the Eee is operating with the lid closed, so it's possible I might not have to do this.  I might have the whole Eee in a slide-out carriage in my 1-DIN radio bay so it slides out, I flip the lid up, and have a touch screen interface but could also use the keyboard if I wanted or could slip it off the carriage and take it with me.  If it works, that would be preferable to me.

If I try a cable extension, I think I'd like to solder the ends of the severed cable to some other kind of connector, like a DB25, so I could try different extension lengths.  I'd love to find someone selling parts of a toasted Eee that would sell me that cable only so I had one to experiment with.

brimnac wrote:

The amount of time and money required to do what you are asking seems counter-productive. I realize, just like anyone else, you want to do it to "have done it," but it seems kind of stupid if there are A) easier and B) cheaper solutions. Common sense can go a long way. Just get an in car touch screen and mount your PC on your passenger side (dash, seat, tray, who cares). It makes *no* sense to do anything else, you'll end up paying much more in the long run.

*Edited to change "their" to "there." Grammar sucks.

My car is a 1985 Mercedes 380SL.  That means that 1) Most of the summer there is no top on the car, 2) This is a small 2 seater sports car, which means dash space is at a premium, 3) If I have a mount for any kind of screen, it basically says, "There's probably a GPS or something expensive in the glove compartment, so break it open!', and 4) I'm working on making it look vintage.  I have the faceplate from a Becker BE612, the radio/cassette that was in cars like this in 1985 when they rolled off the showroom floor.  When I got this car (a year ago today, as a matter of fact!), it was in almost mint condition and I'm bringing it back to mint, which I can do with one paint job (it's been polished so much the paint is wearing thin) and about another $1,000 for wood trim and carpeting.  While it's my daily driver, there are some shows in this area that I may put it in.

I am also using the carputer as a test bed for some possible robotics work I plan to do so much of what I'm doing here will be carried forward in other work.

So yes, it does make sense to do it the way I'm planning.

I appreciate your comments, but in this situation a dash mount would be ugly, mess up the lines of a fine convertible, and would be a pain in terms of constantly having to either lock the screen in the trunk or take it with me for about 8 months of the year when I am usually driving topless.

There's no spot on the dash I can cut out.  I'm also NOT going to play round with the look of a classic car, which is why I have my mind set.  I got this car in just fantastic condition and it's amazing the low amount of work it's taking to make it look almost like it just rolled off the show room floor this week instead of 23 years ago.  The Becker stereo isn't the most attractive, but it goes with the style of the car.

Yes, I'm going to take pictures.  I'm going to blog the heck out of this.  I figure when I'm done I'll have a lot of info on taking a low cost computer and using it to add a lot of functions to my car.  Also when I've got the slide out carriage working, I'm sure a lot of people will want the pics and templates for that, especially if it's fairly easy to do.

MaiCody wrote:

eeepc lcd is perfect for carputer, it blows my lilliput lcd screen out of the water.

lilliput--> most common lcd ts for carputer

I take it that also means screen brightness on the Eee is no issue for a carputer?

As I said, I also think one advantage, if I do keep the two parts together, is that I can not only use it as my carputer, but also take it with me when I need to for other use.

The only concern I have that I haven't addressed is the startup issue.  I like turning on the ignition now and my CD will start up in the same place it was.  I haven't looked into hibernation/sleep/resume issues yet (and that's always confused me), but I'd love it if I could make the Eee suspend activity when the ignition goes off and when I turn it on again, have the Eee boot (I take it that it boots fast with solid state drives!) and pick up where it left off, even down to the same spot in the song I was listening to.

I checked the EEECTL site and they don't say much about what EEECTL actually does.  I see references to Vista, so can I assume it's a Windows only program?  I'll be putting LinuxICE on my Eee carputer, which means Road Runner is out, but if Road Runner can do it, I'd think any other FE could pick up where it left off on restart.

Thanks!

It is Windows only, right?

If it lets you control these things, then most are probably controlled by settings somewhere that should be easily changed by other programs as well.  Considering where I'm putting the Eee, raising the fan speed would be useful and a brighter LCD would help (I'm sure that draws more power, too), but I definitely don't want to overclock, since that would effect the temp and heat might already be an issue.

Hello iḿ new with on my eeepc, i like to now if i can connect two external  av video screens ,
so anolog video (component).
The Software i like to use is Linux Ice. 
Maybe someone can help me out, i did a lot of reading but with out results.
Regards Frank (nl)