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A while ago, i got it into my head to build a mp3 player for the car. Well, just because I wanted to, and had no real project to work on. The project had sadly died, mainly due to the fact that I had popped 2 x playstation1 5 inch screens in the process (they are not really popped, but the inverters to power the back-light was blown) I can revive them by using a known L.E.D. mod, which allows L.E.D. lights to replace the functionality for the screens. This mod allows the adjusted screen to need way less power (5V only, and not the usual 7.5 V) as the LEDs require less power. I just have not had the gumption to do this, as I found I am not spending that much time in the car on trips anyways, so the player would become a waste. One day i will revive the project.
Well, all in all, it was not a complete waste, as MiniMoo was born. This mini system would have been the actual player in the car, and consists of a 233Mhz PC/104 board. I got the board off e-bay for about 24 pounds, but had no connectors for it. After a few days of googling, I found the manual for it, which allowed me to identify the pins for the connectors on board. This allowed me to solder my connecting wires directly onto the connector pins. I also built a small signal converter which allowed the VGA output to connect to the input of the PS1 screen (which was modded for VGA input) I did not take many pictures of this project, but below are some. MiniMoo is now used to drive my webcam, which in turn is used in the kitchen to monitor an open window. The motion detection allows me to be sure no-one climbs through the window, which is left open for the cat. This is the 25pin D-connector which holds all the 'outside world' connectivity. In there is power (12v/5v), vga and usb to name a few)  This is it connected to an external vga monitor, busy compiling the base linux install. Notice i have it on th network via a USB wireless 3com office connect dongle, which comes out of the custom socket I had wired up for it.  Here you can see I have a cdrom drive also connected. Oh yeah, in the back you can see the Commodore AMIGA power brick witch is used to power his machine.  A close-up of the cdrom connected. This was needed for the initial system install to boot from the install cd.  Here I had it actually running, connected to the PS1 screen  I placed a 80 gig hard drive inside the case  I added a cooling extractor fan  a close-up of the inside. Here you can see where I fitted the hard drive. You can also see (bottom right) the small circuit which allows the psone lcd screen to be run from the vga socket. This adds a composite sync signal to the vga out.  For a bi, I played around with the idea of running the base off a usb stick, but this was scrapped, as it was just too small, and it ran really hot.  Here you can see the wireless usb stick connected. This allowed me to continue the download, as I could now download the rest of the install files direct from internet. In the final version, I had taken the usb wireless dongle appart, and wired it directly onto another USB port inside the case. It was mounted in the top right hand corner with some glue.  Well, that was the build of MiniMoo. It runs a Linux version called 'Linux from Scratch'. Took forever to compile some of the packages, mainly the mysql server, and zoneminder, and xorg. Minimoo currently lives in the kitchen, where it is used to drive the security camera which monitors an open window (see my uvc camera writeup) The 80 gig hard drive is not used much. |
