Right now its running off a 140 watt inverter with no problems at all, it even survives cranking without restarting. I do however want to finish up on this shutdown controller i'm working on for it, noting too fancy just a 16f877 pic chip @ 20MHZ driving some relays and monitoring some voltage inputs. When finished, it will sense the acc line going high (key on), wait 5 seconds then ground the power on pin in computer for a second or so to simulate pushing the power button, after turning the car off it will wait 1 minute, "push the power button", so the computer goes into hibernation, then wait another 4 or 5 minutes at the most to kill power to the inverter, all this time keeping an eye on the #1 priority - the battery voltage, if it ever drops below say 11.3 volts for more than 10 seconds, kill inverter power immediately so make sure i got enough juice to start the car.
I tossed the 4mhz crystal that came with it in favor of the 20mhz one so that I can do serial hookups at 19200.....why?...for datalogging of course
I forgot about the shock rating referring to when the heads are parked, i guess i'll just have to keep my fingers crossed and mount it snug on a foam pad or something to dampen the bad vibes. Laptop drives are way too pricy for thier small capacity, i'm hoping I dont have to resort to buying one of those.
Its going to sit under the passanger seat, away from the magnets and mayhem in the trunk - thats also part of the reason I crammed it into an old vcr case.
That screen is a 7" directed video unit (rvm700 i think) I got a GREAT deal on it - free - from my brother (thanks Andre), I just opened it up, probed the little connector and found the +/- and video input and soldered new connectors in its place. Its not a touchscreen though, i'll probably look into getting a touchscreen overlay one day soon.
The input is composite though, and as anyone with tv out on thier computer knows, reading tiny text is out of the question, thats ok though its not for web browsing its a movie/picture/game/music visualizations display, and for that it works beautifully.
edit: whew! long post
