Car PCs have gained rapid popularity as more and more drivers  seek to add excitement and some useful value to their daily commutes.  A computer running various customized applications is a vast improvement  to having simply a good CD or a DVD player in the dashboard and is a  great alternative to all aftermarket car stereos.

I, of course, wanted to put a PC in my car too. The flexible and  expandable power of a PC is the only way to benefit from a CD/DVD player,  music library, Internet connection, calculator (or any other tool) as  well as some statistics about car trips - gas usage, average/max speeds etc…

Having said all that, the question becomes: what is different in my  project, compared to all other car PC projects, which you can find on the Web?

First of all, I don’t want to put a PC in the car trunk.  You might guess that my wife helped me very much in making this decision (Oh, no-no-no! You  are not putting that box in the car trunk!). I also wanted to refrain from having  to put a box, no matter how miniature, in the glove compartment,  behind the passenger seat  or anywhere else in the interior of the car. My only available  option was to replace the existing car stereo, which meant that the PC had to be  small enough to fit in the dashboard of the car.

Secondly, being a software developer myself, I wanted to create an application  that would integrate all the different functions I'd like to have in my car and  offer an easy to operate user interface. Of course, nothing is as easy as it sounds  and the realization of my idea turned to be quite a challenge. Here is why:

If you have built your own car PC (or have one installed by a company or a friend),  you would find that you have very different ergonomic needs and priorities while you are driving, compared to your regular stationary desktop experience. If you do not agree with me, just try to  use any desktop application in your car for a week or two and then we can talk again.

I decided that it was unacceptable to simply install and use all the conventional  desktop applications I wanted in the car environment. Even with a touch screen option  on the LCD, the interaction is still desktop-oriented with the assumption that all objects  around you are not moving at all or are moving with a speed slower than 1m/s (unless  there is a product release on the horizon then believe me - you’d see some of your  colleagues moving a bit faster than that, but you are definitely safe in your cubicle).

And thirdly, I’d like eventually to be able to offer a hardware/software  bundle to some other searching souls like myself that want to do something  more useful while in traffic than switching radio stations. Yes, I am one of  these people that spend about 2 hours a day in their cars (which totals about  15-20 days/year – almost a full work month!). I hate the feeling that I cannot  do anything useful, except for searching stations to find something that  wasn’t playing this morning, the morning before or last week.