 We have a notebook to give away later. Is that loud enough for everybody? We got that turned up. Is that good? Great. I don't know if you guys saw the talk yesterday on automotive networks, but that pretty much covered the CAN bus, the OBD2 protocol. Yes, we have some fans. So I'm not going to go into that. I'm not going to be so technical. You know what can be done with that or if you don't buy the video for this presentation. This talk is going to be more about adding your own computer to supplement your car's computer. And it's something that I'm thinking some of you have done, but probably not enough of you because it's so easy and so fun and so beneficial. And if anybody owns a navigation system that they bought after they bought their car, this is going to save them $1,000. So why do you want to put a computer in your car? Those obvious features you can gain, navigation, GPS. I'm going to go into that later. We're going to talk about what are the problems you're going to encounter, a car's a violent environment for a computer. It's hard to even use your laptop in the car. So to build a computer that's going to stay in the car the entire time is a tough task. And how are you going to overcome these problems? There are ways. And what is the future of technology in cars? Now you see this is what we don't want the future to be. Windows has been at this since 2002, right? I wanted to show you a video. You can go to that address that you see up there. I'll give you the link later if you can't read it. They basically want Windows to be in every car and we want the penguin to be in every car. Alright, or BOS. So why, what, and how are we going to do this? The features you can get by adding just a regular PC, Linux, Apple, whatever you want. It doesn't matter. To the car, you can get mv3 playback. It can replace your stereo completely. In fact, in my car it is. And if you'd like after the presentation, we can head over there. It's parked in the front. I'll show you everything. We've got navigation capabilities. Some Microsoft products you can use if you like that. There's Garmin makes a navigation software. And you can basically replace and do even better than a navigation system can do. And the data's in your computer. You don't need to pop in a DVD. You can do war driving with a GPS. And a lot of people do, but they usually do with a laptop. You can have it built into your car. Every time you drive somewhere, everywhere you go, access points being logged. DVD and MPEG playback is always fun. And that's something that some navigation systems can do. This car computer can do it. You can also control your vehicle's devices. Windows up and down from the touchscreen in your dash. Air conditioning on some model cars. This is exciting stuff. The costs. You can spend easily over $2,000 on a DVD player, a navigation system, the audio stuff in your car. I know a lot of people are probably into that. Over $2,000 for a touchscreen LCD type of system. And it's a lot of installation and expense. A homemade car computer with GPS and a touchscreen LCD, which I'll show you where you can get that, is going to be around $1,000. That's not including installation, which you're going to have to do yourself, but it's easy, trust me. Why should you do it? Because you can. That's the attitude of a lot of people here at DEF CON. And I think you should take it up in relation to this. You're a geek. You love computers. That's why you're here. And what's one more computer that can satisfy your needs better in the car? A laptop is great, but it's not permanent. And there's a lot of features, a lot of things you can't do. Desktops are great, but they take up a lot of space. They're noisy. They use up a lot of power. And it's kind of ugly to have a big beige box in your trunk. And that's no good. And if you do have a big beige box in your trunk, it's going to be modified anyway. So I'm going to call that a car pewter, too. It's cheap. It's easy. It's fun. And if you saw Adam Bressen's talk, you should just do it. It's basically just a bunch of Cots, commercial off-the-shelf products, that you're going to integrate in a way so that you can utilize those products together and get all these features that you're looking for. You're going to want a DVD drive. This is just basic stuff. I'm not going to teach you how to build a computer. You know how to do that. But I'm going to teach you how to choose the right parts for a car computer. You're going to want a GPS unit. I'll give you the manufacturers later. A Wi-Fi card. I have a USB Avaya. It's basically an Orinoco Gold in a USB enclosure, which makes it real easy to put in the trunk. You're going to want an LCD, some sort of interface, a touchscreen, a wireless keyboard. I personally have a Griffin PowerMade. I can change songs. I can change applications. I can sort of scratch the song a little bit while I'm driving. Yes, mobile DJ. Awesome. So for power, you need a way to give this computer, either AC power, which will then convert to DC power, 12 volts, five and a half volts. I forget all the voltages. But you're going to need to either get a DC to DC power source, or you're going to need to get an inverter for the car. And sometimes, if you want to get an inverter that's powerful enough, if you're running a subwoofer, if you have amps for the speakers in your cars, you're going to go ahead and maybe even need to upgrade the battery. But that's a more advanced use, right? So choosing the right parts, you need to choose a good case for this computer. Personally, I have the MSI Mega. It's a Hi-Fi stereo and bare-bones PC in one with motherboard. It's selling for like $150, so definitely a good buy. It comes with the power source. The Shadow PCs, I'm sure some people will have those or have seen them. You can go with any mini micro ATX. They're small. They're easy. They don't use a lot of power. And as long as they have the onboardness that you need, audio out, video out, even a tuner car would be great. And you want to choose something that's going to be easily expandable later. Lots of USB ports. Get a USB hub. Things like that. For the power source, you're going to want to choose one that's quiet, that runs cool. Your trunk is a really hot place. And especially if I drove to Las Vegas and I barely made it. My computer was winding. There were some beeps coming from the inverter. I don't know what's going on. But the trunk was very hot. There's DC to DC power sources specifically made for car computers. You can pick them up. They're usually a little bit expensive. So I don't have one yet. But you can use those. And you can also use those with an automatic turn on shutdown board that'll allow you to have the computer start when you start the ignition and shut down when you turn the ignition off. For the hard drive. See, I'm just going to go through a couple of these components, the most essential components. One that's quiet and cool running as well. But you need a reliable hard drive. I don't know. Some people like Mac Store. Some people like Western Digital. Personally, I have a Mac Store. It hasn't had any problems. But you may want to investigate further some sort of a device to slow down the vibrations. Because inside a car, I'm expecting my hard drive to crash at any moment. It's just, it's a really rough. And I drive a Mustang, which is not very smooth. What's that? Okay. If you've got lots of money or you want to go with a smaller computer, you can get a solid state drive, like a compact flash drive with an ID converter or something like that. And that will solve the hard drive problem completely. For connectivity, you're going to want to have at least Wi-Fi in the vehicle. Right? I've got like a $20 Magnon antenna that works great. You can stick it outside the car if I want to seriously war drive or when I'm driving to Vegas. You can leave it inside the car otherwise. You can use it to get data from other access points that are open or your house. Bluetooth is fun because you can hook your phone up and with some software applications, you can have it mute the stereo if you get a call, play through the speaker phone. Bluetooth is just fun. GPS is a must. It's getting less and less expensive for $90, $80, $75, even used on the UA for less. You can get a small USB or serial GPS module that will allow you to, say, use Net Stumbler with GPS locations. It will allow you to use Map Point or Streets and Trips to get your location, give you directions live while you're driving in the car. Some people go ahead and incorporate cellular technology for internet connectivity. If you guys have heard of Ricochet, they're not in too many major areas, but it's like a wireless internet provider. It's like two times the speed of 56K. They're in San Diego, I believe, if they haven't gone bankrupt yet, but I'm hoping they're going to come to LA. It's a service fee and it's just something that's great for car computers. I've talked to some people that live in San Diego and they use it. So environmental concerns. Why isn't this widely available yet and what's slowing down Microsoft and other companies from implementing it widespread? Your trunk gets hot, your car gets hot, vibrations kill hard drives. It's not even a pleasant environment for computers. It's sometimes not even a pleasant environment for people. There's lots of power consumption that the computer uses. It uses a lot of power and it uses it inefficiently, especially if you've got the inverter, because you're going from DC to AC to DC again. There's a lot of heat generated in that and it's just an inefficient process overall. All right. What can you do with a car computer besides the obvious things? You can really do anything you can think of. Think of having a computer in your car, anything you can do with a computer that doesn't require something that's in your house or something that goes with your laptop. You can do with a car computer. You can sync your MP3 collection whenever you drive up to your house. So you leave for the day. You want some different MP3s. You just pull up, connect to your AP, grab those MP3s and you can leave again. You can download news, weather, traffic information if you've got subscriptions or an account to some of these Wi-Fi access points that are located all over at our favorite coffee shops or random people's houses. You can use OBD2 to diagnose your car's problems and you can use aftermarket alarm systems like a Clifford system. They're an alarm maker to control your windows, your car's devices, your headlights, your alarm. You can set parameters. You can just completely configure them. It's meant to be used on a laptop that's plugged in once in a while but if you leave it on, it becomes a very powerful tool to be used in the car. I forget the name. It's a Clifford program that you can get when you buy the alarm. So software is really the missing piece in the puzzle. There's some open source initiatives. There's some utilities for Linux that are basically GUIs over popular MP3 players, DVD players, whatever you like. Write your own software. The community is really missing out because there's no good, good software that takes care of everything nicely. All people have written so far are sort of small utilities. They're bulky. They don't support touch screens. They don't work on the platform you want. So it's very important that we get out there and write some good software if we're going to beat other companies to the punch on this. Do some research. That's way. Google it. mp3car.com is another resource. You can go in there. You can check the forums. You can talk with people. You can just basically see what other people have done. There are some amazing cars out there. If you know how to fiberglass, you can basically install anything you want into your dash. I've seen LCDs in the dash. Small character displays in the dash. Wireless keyboards in the visor. Just complete control console. There's been 15-inch LCDs mounted in the dash. Overhead LCDs. There's a wide variety of things that have been done. I've seen about a thousand different cars that this has been done to. But it's still not widely known. Every time somebody gets into my car, what's that? Why is there a touch screen in your dash? Why is Windows starting up? Why is Linux starting up? I'm going to go ahead and open up it for some questions. This is mainly about research. You've got to get out there and do your research. You've got to get out there and just do it. It's easy. It's fast. You can do it with a cheap little computer. You can do it with a big computer. I have a Pentium 4, 2.4, 2.6, something like that in my computer. You don't need a lot of RAM unless you're going to be watching DVDs or photoshopping in your car. I don't know. But you can do anything in your car. I frequently wait for people, and I just sit there and play a video game, search the internet if there's an AP around. Let me take some questions. I have something to show you over there that's awesome, and you can use that in your car if you can find one, which I'll show you in a minute. But go ahead and ask your question. Cold? The question was, how does cold affect the computer? I think cold is going to be less of a threat than heat because the computer is already getting hot. I'd be worried more about moisture. Moisture is terrible. Your car usually is pretty good about keeping the outside out and the inside in, but if you want, you can go ahead and put the computer in a more secure place, sort of not out of the directly underneath where the trunk opens, because that's where water is going to get if it gets anywhere. Any questions? Okay. He's asking about the contrast ratio on LCDs. He picked up some cheap LCDs. I seem to think that minus 400 to 1, it's not so expensive because so many people are demanding these that they found them and on the forums on mp3car.com, you can find them. You're looking around 250 to 350 for a color 7-inch widescreen LCD touchscreen which is going to be serial. It's a little bit more expensive for USB. Brightness is also super important. 300 nits is the minimum I would say because in daylight, that's even going to be sort of fuzzy. If you've got tinted windows, that's a plus. If you don't, tint them. Yes, mounting the computer in the glove box is the question. Yes, you can do that. Personally, I haven't done it, but I've seen many pictures of cars that have done it. I've even met one guy who's done it. It's easy. It's just as easy as mounting a CD-DVD changer in the glove box, which is frequently done. There are computers that are fully sustained in one small box, the size of a CD-D changer, which you can buy the Cappuccino PC if anybody's a fan of ThinkGeek. There's some other brands. And if you have a huge glove box, you can sort of remove the back of it and use that space between the firewall and the glove box to put the computer in there and you can put a larger computer. It makes a lot of sense to do that because all your interface is in the front. In my car, I've run USB to the console, a powered USB cable, and there's a hub in there so I can plug in whatever devices I want, but I'm sure it'd be a lot easier to put the computer in the front of the car if you've got the space. And I'm not saying there's no space at all. So the computer's in a chunk and that's even pushing it because I have a subwoofer. I put all bags in the back seat. The only problem with putting the computer in the glove box is if you want to have a good stereo system, you're going to want to have the amps in the back so you're going to need to run wires to the back of the car and then wires to the speakers. And that can be a problem and can be expensive if you don't know how to do it yourself. Let me just add one thing. Sound quality on onboard sound cards, as you know, isn't very good and it can be fuzzy, especially with the engine noise and other things that happen in a car. I use an external sound card, the Sound Blaster X2G. It's about $100, I think. It supports USB sound, but I personally am not a fan of that. So I just go optical out of my MSI Mega into that and it splits it into 6.1 surround sound. Question? Have I played with the placement of the wireless connections to the GPS? Personally, my stuff is right in the back, above the back seats, so that the whole back window is over it and I think that is probably the best place signal-wise. If you want to put them on your front dash, that works too. If you have a sunroof, maybe you want to run it out to the roof. But I personally find it out of the way by putting it on the above the back seats. Go ahead, question. Okay, he says he's got a USB GPS module that sits in the sunroof between the glass and the shade. Do you have a computer in your car, sir? No. What's the GPS for? For your laptop. So you do have a computer in your car sometimes. Do you like it? Do you do all the things that I've talked about or is it limiting some of them? Any other questions? In the back. Multiple audio inputs. Okay. Both. The computer has audio inputs. You can obviously use those and the X-TG has audio inputs. You can use those. If you're going to hook up a PlayStation, it's probably going to be wherever the computer is for power reasons. And you can plug that input into the computer and just pass it through. If you don't have onboard inputs for some reason, you should have a line in. You can use the X-TG or similar product, or you can hook it up straight to the amps on a second channel. I have no deck in my car. There's no radio except for the radio that's integrated into the MSI Mega. I had a really expensive LCD stereo system and I sold it on eBay and paid for the car plus. Played for the car system plus some. The touchscreen interface is an ELO touchscreen. It's got Windows drivers, so that's what I'm using it with. There's some Linux drivers for it, but they're tough to use and they're poorly documented as far as I've seen. There's other brands of touchscreens that may work better, but the touchscreen is not going to be the problem. The problem is going to be, say, which wireless keyboard are you going to use, what other interfacing devices are you going to use? The touchscreen is easy. It never breaks down. It's serial. Even though I'm not a fan of serial devices, it works fine. Question in the back. Head-up displays. A while ago, I heard about somebody who had got it to work in a Cadillac, I think. He's asking about heads-up displays, sort of projecting an image onto the windshield. It's a great idea. It looks great in science fiction movies, but it's not working yet. I would love to have that work. If anybody has got that to work, please let me know. I'd like to see pictures of it, and maybe I'll be working on that in the future. I've always wanted to put a projector in the car and somehow project an image, either out the back or onto the roof or onto some sort of piece of glass, but it hasn't happened yet. Question. He's asking about a sort of car docking station for your laptop, so put the laptop in, use its computing power, and leave with the laptop. It's probably safer for theft reasons. I haven't heard of that. You can use a standard dock, I suppose, though. This IBM laptop has a dock, which has a dock which can be, I guess you could sort of screw it onto the side of the car and just mount it there and use the LCD with the VGA out. It's really up to you. Anything you can think of, you can usually do in a car. A lot of people are like, well, you can't run wires in a car. Yes, you can. All those little plastic pieces come right off. I'm not a car expert. All I have is the manual to my car and the schematic wiring diagrams. Question. Have I ever dealt with the display in on the car deck? Yes, a lot of people use an expensive flip-up screen, sort of, with an ox in. You can do that. And you can use a composite monitor. You can use a television. You can use whatever you want. But there's two problems with that. One, you need to have the video out on your computer, which can be tough for small computers. The MSI Megat does not come with a video out. You can add a card, but it's got to be low-profile because it only has one PCI slot and it's low-profile. Two, the resolution isn't so great on those, and you're going to end up having to make all the text bigger because it's fuzzy. It's like trying to read an 800 by 600 computer monitor on a small TV screen. It's only good for video and MP3s if you've got, like, five lines. Like an LCD, like a small, you know, regular LCD with just a character display. Yes, you can absolutely do that. I don't know about the software you would need to interface with, like, a third-party CD player with one of those LCDs, but you can go on PriceWatch and price out just the character LCDs and go ahead and use plugins for, like, Winamp or, I know there's some utilities for Linux on SourceForge that will allow you to send whatever data, serial data to those connections and you can view whatever you want. I saw an M3 which had been done with one of those and it was great because he could have all sorts of information on the steering wheel in the small LCD. Go ahead. What drives the cost? They were engineered and made for this purpose, mainly for this purpose. I'm sure there's commercial ones out there. I'm sure there's, on airplanes, there's a need for DC to DC power supplies, but they were manufactured for the MP3 car community, so to speak, by manufacturers on the forums and they're charging a premium for the research and development. For 90 bucks you can get, I think, a 70, 80, 90 watt power supply and for 150 you can get 160 watt power supply. I'd go with the larger wattage because you're going to end up needing it. Go ahead. What's the power supply doing? It's taking your 12 volt unregulated, which means the 12 volt can range anywhere from, say, 8 to 19 and your computer can't handle 19 volts. It can't handle 8 volts. It's going to end up screwing it up. So this thing takes in whatever voltage your car line is giving it, converts it to 12, 3.5 or 5.5 and the various voltages that your motherboard and the components need to run on. Question? So he wants to, with a cell phone connection, remotely control his car, start the car, right? Is that what you're talking about? Start the AC. That's all being taken care of by such things as a third-party alarm system. I suppose you could do it, but I think you're better off finding a system that will do remote start and just utilizing that. I'm trying to see if we're going to have time. I'm sure we are. To show you this computer I've got over here, which would be an excellent solution. It's an old point-of-sale computer, but it runs everything over one ethernet cable. Let me see if I can plug this in. So this is the computer, right? 333. I think it's an Athlon. It's got a 6G hard drive. It just sits in this little small laptop-type thing. It's got one ethernet jack, right? And this ethernet jack connects to that touchscreen monitor, which also has a card reader, a mag stripe reader, and a keyboard attached to it. You could put that in the dash of your car, put this wherever really you want, and have everything you need. These things aren't cheap. I picked this one up at some sort of hardware sale. It was cheap. It was broken, and I fixed it. But you can find these. This is the Javelin... Javelin... I forget the model, but there's only one. In my car, I have a 7-inch screen. This is a 12-inch screen. So it's a 12-inch touchscreen monitor. It's going to do everything you need. It's got a PS2 port on the bottom, a card reader on the bottom, a mag stripe reader. Very useful. It's booting right now. I think it's got 2,000 on it. I don't personally use this in my car because I already had the other computer when I got it. But things like this are very, very nice. Anything with everything included that you would need on it already is great. No one's a fan of Windows in here. I'm sure you all use it anyways. But this thing is great. It's got a touchscreen. And check it out. All of this over one CAT5 cable, any CAT5 cable, 100 feet. I've actually never seen them for sale, except for the place I bought them. But you can look them up. They're Javelins. I had to sell them to restaurants. But if you find a broken one or an old one, or anything similar to this, I took this apart. I mean, it used to have like a cash register and all sorts of other shit. But all you need is the computer and the screen. Windows is broken. I haven't had a problem with my spark plugs. The question was, do I have special spark plugs? Anything special in the engine to prevent engine noise or noise in the electrical system with the computer? There's been no problem at all with audio. I've had a slight problem with video where I get sort of cascading lines down it. And it has to do with... I use a very shielded VGA cable that's run from the back. But for some reason, at the connector, it's getting noise. So I'm thinking about figuring out different ways to shield it. That's an idea I hadn't really investigated about changing the spark plugs. Question? A ground isolator, possibly. But it really doesn't come up that often. So I haven't had to deal with it. Go ahead. The optical cable he's saying is probably trimming out the noise. That's probably why I chose optical. But I think it also helps just to have that audio out of the car in general. I could somehow run optical, I'm sure, to the amps, but that intermediate step of the exegy is really helpful for audio quality. Is there a question over here? Okay. The question is, how do I regulate the voltage when the car is cranking? First of all, I splurged a little bit. I got the yellow top battery. I forget the brand. Anyone know the brand? Optima Yellow Top. What's it? Optima Yellow Top. That's right. It's better for cranking. Usually when I start the car, the computer will stay on if it's already on. But I try not to run it for too long without the battery because that can drain the battery, obviously, and it's just my inverter is kind of temperamental. It'll beep when it gets to low voltage. And also, another thing that people have used easily is an old UPS. Even a UPS that only works for five or six seconds is great because if you plug it in between the inverter and the computer while the car is cranking, it'll have a hissy fit and beep and stuff because it won't think it has power. But after a couple seconds, the power will come back and the computer will be uninterrupted. There are startup and shutdown circuits that have been designed for this use on mp3car.com. You can find those. They're not cheap. You can build your own. There are schematics. And it's an excellent way to go because that way it's really nice. You get in the car, you start the car. Here's the BIOS. You leave the car, you turn it off and you can be out of the car and the computer's still shutting down, but you don't have to worry about draining the power because this thing shuts the power off after a determined amount of time. Do I have any more questions? Go ahead. OBD-0 and OBD-1, I haven't had any experience with it. My car's a Mustang 2000. It runs OBD-2. And also those interfacing devices are pretty expensive. You might be able to pick some of the ones for older OBD ports up for cheap, but OBD-2 can run you over $100. Okay, cool. And also, if you guys saw Automotive Networks, he completely covered everything you could ever want to know about OBD-2. Very interesting talk. And that's kind of why I cut out some of the more technical parts of OBD-2 in the CAN bus. I had a question about photos in the middle. You know what? I had some photos and I couldn't find them to put it in the presentation. Tell you what. Go on MP3 car, check out the examples there and you can search for my name and you'll probably find some of my posts, and you can see the pictures there. Question? Any more questions? Go ahead. Unfortunately, yes. The question was, all the good GPS programs for turn-by-turn directions while you're driving run under windows. It's mostly true, but you guys can change that. I see lots of smart people. I see lots of people I know that are really good coders. And VMware, yes. Roadmap and Roadmap runs on Linux. No. Don't use Festival, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, the Night Rider plugin. That's another thing that's great about these things. You can skin them any way you want. There is a Night Rider skin. There's a Mustang skin. There's a Linux skin. I think somebody made a SourceForge skin. I don't know. Anything you want, you can get on the car. You can get a skin by the brand of your car and you can have a big Mercedes logo on the front. Go ahead. It's Streets and Trips, I think, with a plugin that somebody wrote, because I think Streets and Trips limits you to one refresh of the GPS data every second or every few seconds. Somebody's written a small script that is integrated into that and refreshes it very quickly. And Streets and Trips is useful for that. It's, you know, Streets and Trips are a map point. They're both, they're in the same line of products. One's the more expensive one. One's the cheaper one. And with the right plugins, with the right additions, you can get it to do live directions. You can get it to show your GPS. And you can even get it to pass that GPS to NetStomber at the same time. Right now in my car I can do one or the other, either GPS navigation or mapping Wi-Fi hotspots with GPS information. Go ahead. That's right. He's saying it's important to get a big company when you're choosing the version of navigation you're going to use so that they'll update their maps. Personally, I have the action pack at work at a company that deals with a lot of Microsoft products, unfortunately. But I get a map point for free, so, and that is definitely going to be updated, you know, in every version. And it even goes on the internet and checks for conditions. I drove over here from LA. And when I got the directions, it told me there was road construction between Victorville and Barstow this month, so it's very helpful to have these things in the car. Any questions? Go ahead. Question is, Linux Myth TV in the car possibly? No, I've never seen that. Yes, it's a great idea. Yes, you should do it. And I would hope to see that next year. Maybe we'll have a Hacker car, too. That's right. Thank you all for coming to the presentation. I'd like to thank DarkTangent for throwing such a great con dead-eye for picking my speech, LA2600, DC213, even though I haven't been doing a meeting yet. And everybody else, have a safe drive home today. Thank you.