Per's Audi S4 Website

Date installed: 3/10/2004
(taken from old website)

I make my living via computers, so it was bound to happen sooner or later.

This project took about 3 months to research, plan, order parts, and install. Since then, there have been continual improvements. It was a team effort and there's no way I could have done any of it without Ansen (a.k.a. Audimods from AW/Audizine, see audimods.com). He knows his stuff around Audi's and electronics and did the heavy lifting in a lot of areas. Mp3car.com is THE best resource for anyone wanting to do this and was my sole source of research once I found it. Lots of smart people there than will point you in the right direction.

Overall, I had two very specific requirements:

• Retain stock look as much as possible
• Retain stock head unit so that my wife (it's our only car) can at any time bypass the PC and just use the normal stereo

The second one effectively took out the option to do an integrated monitor where the head unit is, which would have been very cool, but oh well. On with the story...

The making of
There are a couple of options in terms of PC platform: Pentium or mini ITX based. The later uses much less power, is smaller and is therefore a lot more attractive for car use, but I always like to hedge for unreasonable futures ("what if I need to do AutoCAD on it some day?") so I went with the Pentium ;-)

Now, my hope was still to completely hide the PC, and the area I had in mind was the trunk where the CD changer is.

So, I found a small PC (link leads to site, specific model I had doesn't seem to be available anymore) which fit right where the CD changer is above. Everything seemed good to go. But - what about power? (Power is the hardest thing to figure out with one of these...ask anyone). The PC came with a laptop powered brick, and now I needed to find out how to hook it up to the car. Some say inverters, others say you need a DC-DC supply since inverters are notoriously noisy. I thought I'd still try the cheaper/easier inverter option first. But what should happen when I turn of the ignition? Let the PC crash? uh, no. So, off I go looking for the smallest UPS I could find that still offered USB management so I could use Windows XP's built in control panel applet to tell it to hibernate if UPS sensed it lost power. APC made one that fit right where the toolbox is above..all right, so far so good! The world came tumbling down when I realized that the PC power brick would just suck all of the juice out of the UPS even after the PC was shutdown. Seems obvious, as it's like a laptop wanting to 'charge the battery' but it didn't occur to me until I witnessed it :(

So...

Take 2
After more research, I found out the way to go - in terms of power - was to either get a special power supply that would take care of this, or a shutdown controller which would essentially do the same thing. A key requirement for either: an ATX based motherboard which the unit plugs into in order to do its magic. That requirement had a profound effect on the size of the PC I would have in the car, and therefore, if I could have something completely hidden or not. I chose to go with the power supply from Opus Solutions. Expensive, but worth it. It also handles things like keeping the computer safe and running while cranking the engine (which incurs huge drop/spikes in voltage) and givign you options of running for 1, 10, 20 minutes past when the ignition is shut off before hybernating.

Opus made a power supply for the Shuttle PC's, which is what I had now chosen to go with. Specifically, the SB61G2. It's fairly small, has advanced cooling technology (another big worry), and has the right amount of ports for everything (USB, audio, etc.).

What about all of the other hardware? Here's the list.