To Fabricate or not to Fabricate…

Well, this is probably the easiest decision I’ll need to make. Given that the car is parked on the road every once in awhile, I quickly came to the conclusion that a ‘removable’ installation is just going to ask for trouble so, it’s an in-dash install – and with that, it’ll need to ‘look factory’ which means fabrication, which means I won’t be doing it.

The reasons I’ve opted to not do the fabrication myself:

• I’ve no prior experience in fabricating stuff
• I’d need to buy all the tools and materials
• It’d take a fair amount to research time to decide what needed doing and how to do it
• All in all, it’s more efficient in terms of time, money and finished look to let the professionals do the fabrication.

So, armed with the images below, I headed to a local car stereo installers for a quote – “About NZ$200 mate”, fairly reasonable I thought…

 

So the theory will be, the ashtray and cigarette lighter will be replaced with a fabricated slot which will hold my existing head unit which is currently sitting in a box ex-my old car, people who are not familiar with the Carputer will then be able to use this to listen to stuff as they drive. The carputer will be connected via the CD stacker input and be controlled via the touch screen which replaced the current 2x 1-DIN crappy units which came with the car.

Next Step: Plan the layout of the devices and what plugs in to what (and where) – I need to have the setup all running and ready to install with a very simple interface, just in case the installers find it easier to fabricate and connect everything in the one go. Some things for me to consider:

• Power layouts
• Power screen directly or off the Carputer?
• Use the ‘auto on’ function of the Lilliput (and where was that link I read detailing this?)
• Remote switch to allow the Carputer to be isolated/turned on independantly of the ACC switch?

It’s time to head to the forums once again…