The Car:

Ah yes, the car - I guess if you call it a car MP3 player, you'll need to have a car in there somewhere, huh?

In the broadest sense of the term - the car - that I've chosen to install the MP3 player into is a 1984 Buick Century Limited sedan. It currently has 234,000 miles on it and I've vowed not to get rid of it until it reaches one-quarter million miles.

I haven't included a picture yet because I don't want to scare you away. Actually, the car isn't that bad and does seem to run well. In fact, having an older car for this project has been useful. I don't mind sacrificing vents in the dashboard or chopping up the plastic for mouting the LCD display. It's not like I needed those vents for the air conditioning - it doesn't work anymore.

I figure that the sound system to car ratio is pretty high. The sound system is probably worth five times as much as the car itself. I guess I should start calling my car the "MP3 System Transportation Device" ;-)

UPDATE: Unfortunately, my Buick has suffered a major problem and as of March 2001 I've removed the entire sound system from the car. At 240,548 miles, almost 12,000 miles after I put the MP3 Player in the car, the camshaft went and I've decided to get rid of the car and start my next mobile computing project. The MP3 Player worked quite well in the car, and I never had a single skip. Ironically, I never really posted any "final product" pictures until after I actually removed the entire sound system from the car.

Stay tuned - my new car, a 1995 Chevrolet Impala SS, is bigger and better than my Buick was, and so will its sound system and mobile computer. I'm taking a "lessons learned" approach to this project and am custom designing the sound system carefully. It will retain much of the same components from my former car, but will be upgraded in a few key areas for usability and better noise supression. The overall sound system will be clearly better once finished.

And yes, I am in a state of withdrawl being without the system for several months :-\

FURTHER UPDATE: OK, so it is taking me a long time to iron out the details of putting the system in the car, so I decided to just pack up what I had in my Buick and put it in my truck, a 1988 Mazda B2200 Extended Cab pickup truck. I transplanted the system into my truck during the summer of 2001. The installation was actually pretty easy, considering the system was already built. I just had to do the LCD mounting and the wiring. The computer box sits in the rear of the cab on the floor below the subwoofer box. All of the amps and inverter are below the passenger seat and the LCD and infrared receiver are in the dash where the little storage area was. Like all of my cars, this one has high milage - it currently has about 154,000 miles on the odometer. Look for a lot of pictures of this installation in the Pictures section.

This page was last updated on Tuesday, February 12, 2002

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