Hacks 41–54: Introduction

In the first three chapters, I covered the basics of automotive computer integration: car power, car audio, and car video. Now you finally get to hook up your computer. There are many considerations that go into what kind of computer to put in a car. A large, modern, multi-gigahertz computer provides the smoothest in-car gaming experience, but it takes a lot of power and space. A laptop seems an obvious choice for in-car use, but laptops are awkward to mount and difficult to smoothly integrate in a vehicle’s interior. Industry standards exist for rugged, low-power-consumption computers, but these are usually too expensive for consumer use. Fortunately, there has been a lot of rece....