Herculiner – Brush-on Bed Liner Kit

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Well I have two vehicles that are like that and I decided it was long overdue to get something about it done.

My wife has a Nissan Maxima and her headlights were really bad. Each headlight assembly runs anywhere from $350 to $500 and I figured there had to be a something I could do to keep from having to buy new headlight assemblies.

While I was at Wal-Mart I noticed there was a kit just for this situation. It is called Crystal View and it came in a silver bag for only $20 and I thought I would give it a try. Here is a video demonstration of it.

Crystal View Headlight Restorer Defogger Directions

I decided to test it out on my car first and if it did well I would do my wife’s car. I did this in case it messed up, it would only mess up mine and not hers. Remember folks, a happy wife is a happy life.

The Crystal View sort of works, but its NOT the best way to accomplish the “like new” lens look. This kit comes with several sanding pads and some polishing compound. You first scrub it by hand with the heavy grit and a little compound, then move on to the lighter grit with the compound and finish it up by reapplying clear coat over the lens. If your lens is not in terrible shape this might work for you, but its yields unsatisfactory results. It didn’t look “like new” when I was done.

I’m glad I tried this out on my car instead of hers. Hers needed it worse than mine and I want hers to look fantastic when I was done, so this Crystal View stuff was not the ticket.

I consulted with the internet thinking surely I could find a better way to get this done and low and behold I found what I was looking for. You can find out how to do just about anything on the internet.

I came across a video by 3M that advertised a 3M Headlight Lens Restoration System that costs the same amount as the last product I tried.
This kit falls in the same do it yourself category as the other did, only this kit was more hands on and yielded perfect results.

3M Headlight Lens Restoration System

As you will see in the pictures, the 3m headlight restoration kit made the lens of the Maxima look like brand new, and there is no clear coat film added to make it appear like they are restored. These actually are restored to like new condition. They are sanded and polished!

So if you have some yellow headlights, spend the $20 on the 3m kit at your local automotive store, follow the instructional video, and in about one hour you will have fully restored headlights. You will have saved yourself hundreds of dollars and you will be able to see farther at night.

Summary:
Crystal View = Do not buy or waste time on
3M Headlight Lens Restoration System = Excellent buy, worth every penny

A friend of mine recently asked if I would write a post about why I decided to get rid of my carputer system and why I chose the gps navigation system that I did to replace it with.

I decided to get rid of the carputer and switch to a gps navigation system for several reasons.

First, it was not portable, and I could not easily move it from car to truck to freinds car.

Second, I never could get it to properly sync with my cellphone so that I could have hands free calling. This was one of the main reasons for a carputer in the first place. I did manage to get it to work early on, but in order to hear the caller I had to pump up the volume then I would get this terrible bass reverberation in the car, it was madness. I tried all sorts of ‘cheap’ mics and nothing helped. I stopped useing the phone integration about a week after it was in place. I am hoping this gps navigation system that I recently won on ebay will not do the same.

Third, I did not like the navigation system (map software) I was using. I can not even recall what it was that I was using right now, but it was hard to punch in where you wanted to go in a hurry. The menu system was very cumbersome and you surely would have a hard time doing with the menu system while you were driving. You would really have to park, find your destination, then pull back onto the road and go. Thats the safe way to do it anyways.

Forth, the touchscreen is the main thing that enables you to communicate with your carputer and if it doesn’t work, the rest is of no use. On occasion the screen would just go completely white when you touched it. I would have to pull the power to the screen, wait a second, and plug the power back in. Then it would work for a bit and sometimes be fine, sometimes do it all over again. This was beginning to become unreliable. To replace it was way too expensive.

I started thinking that my main uses for a carputer were phone integration, gps navigation system, mp3 storage piped through my existing sound system eliminating the needs for cd’s, and thats about it. That’s all I really needed. With all that in mind, I decided, hey why not sell all of this stuff back on ebay where I purchased it all and I will be able to get what I need.

So if you remember I did sell all my stuff on ebay. <- read about it again if you missed it.

I began to look over several gps navigation systems mostly at Circuit Shitty ( you will not get good help there, go to BEST BUY) and there were a lot that were pricey. I found several that worked with phones via bluetooth ( I think you can marry up to 3 phones to it), could store and play mp3′s, photos, and stuff. I landed on the TOM TOM GO 730. It was reasonably priced, had a 2 gig media storage card that is expandable. I will probably go 8 gig and put photos and music on it. Has a great easy to use menu system and I can even voice where I want to go just by speaking to it. Has cellphone integration and can even read you your text messages to you and I think you can respond to them just by speaking. Also you can take it from one vehicle to another. I think the TOM TOM GO 730 is a real winner for me and my needs. I checked it out and it gets great ratings everywhere I check.

Reflecting on it all now, the custom carputer is a great idea for any hobbiest. I was able to customize it to do whatever I wanted really with enough time and patience and tweeks. I had fabricated a serial cable that would allow me to control my XM Radio, and that was cool and all, but I grew tired of XM playing U2. I cancelled it when I sold all the system. On our trip to Ship Island, we were able to watch 2 full length movies on it to pass the time.  If you wanted to, you could have made it to where when you got within a certain distance of your car, the bluetooth in your cellphone could communicate with your car and make the doors unlock or even start. I mean the possibilities were really endless, but I grew tired of the gps navigator the most with its menu structure and the frustration it caused when I wanted to find something. What I want now is super simplicity and portability.

As you may remember from a previous post, I was lucky enough to win one brand new in sealed box for $300 on ebay this past Friday night. They sell for $450 to $500 in stores. I hope it arrives this week and if it does I will install and do another write up and give all the juicy details.

Type ya later…. 

There have been many times I have went outside to roll the windows up due to rain, crack them due to heat, or whatnot and forgot my keys. 
I was tired of that and finally found a hack to solve the issue. It was simpler than I had imagined.

I happen to own and Dodge Intrepid and was visiting one of my favorite forums DodgeIntrepid.net and notice that user kevin1727 hacked his windows to do this so I will share what was in the post and show you how easy it is to do and you might be able to apply this to your car as well.

First Locate your fuse panel. Mine was just to the left of the steering wheel on the side of the dash.

After I remove the cover it looks like this the picture below.

Now basically all we will be doing is soldering some pieces together and making a jumper. Since the seats are on all the time, we just want to jump that off to the windows so that they will be too.

I took 4 of the 14/16 guage ( I beleive it was) male and female connectors and took the plastic parts off of them.
Now I would take the female ones and where the wire is supposed to be inserted, I spread that open with pliers just enough to put the male ones inside it. Then I solder them together and covered with heat shrink.

On one of them I had to put a jumper wire.

The Pictures provided by kevin1727 over at dodgeintrepid.net can almost speak for themselves.

Here is an image of the relays and the quick disconnects I made.

This is how they look assembled just before pluggin them in.

It was a bit tricky to install, had to wiggle them in with needle nose pliers but its in there now and working great.

Oh and believe it or not, when it rains, I have still grabbed my keys twice and ran outside without thinking.
Old habits are hard to break!

First let me tell you briefly how I got motivated to do such a thing.

There was a time back in 2005 I believe it was, when I traveled from Mississippi to Louisiana quite a bit, and sometimes I would see some really awful accidents
Ok so I am writing this article to describe to everyone how I built, and put to use, a car computer aka “carpc” or “carputer” as some call it.

First let me tell you briefly how I got motivated to do such a thing.

There was a time back in 2005 I believe it was, when I traveled from Mississippi to Louisiana quite a bit, and sometimes I would see some really awful accidents …

Or some just plain amuzing drivers….

and I would think to myself “man I wish I had a video cam mounted that would record my trips, so I can show what I see to others later”.

I even though about it further and though it would be cool to make the recorder record and prompt me to some how save each time I cut the engine off.
That way if I saw something cool I knew it would record it, and when I turn off the engine it would ask to save and if I saw something interesting that I wanted to share with everyone I would simply tell it yes and it would start fresh on the next start up.

Then I got to thinking how can I make this happen? Lets see, I would need a laptop or something in the car to record the video feed to hard drive, and a web cam.

I only thought about it for a little while maybe 20 miles of highway time, then began to think about how I might be able to make it stream the video to the web !! YES that would be awesome!

How could I do that? I asked myself. I thought maybe with a cellular card and dynddns.org, I could capture video from cam to a laptop, then have a webserver (apache) running on this laptop, and have users visit some address like for example carpc.dyndns.org and they would be watching the live cam stream over my cellular card connection. Its very doable but then I got to thinking that the more users, the less bandwidth I would have, and cellular internet is not the best really as it cellular networks were intended for voice data, not the data that being pushed across it today. They can say what they want about edge (2.5G) and 3G (broadband like speeds) being the cellular internet, but what we are truly waiting on is nationwide wifi in the 700mhz spectrum. This cellular internet that everyone is on right now is just a hack, its just another feature that the companies can use to make a buck. It works yes, and compared to dialup days its great, but its not quite there yet.

Anyways back to topic. So I was thinking about all this and thought, thats a lot of trouble really, not to mention cellular drops, so I scratched the whole thing. Put that idea on a shelf for a while.

Then it was sometime in early 2006 when I saw an article in Popular Science magazine called “A DIY Dashtop Computer” . You can read it here A DIY Dashtop Computer.

It said “Why settle for the standard stereo or a GPS unit when you can have an in-car PC running off your car’s battery to guide the way, watch the engine diagnostics, and download tunes?”
It was labeled as intermediate and between $1000 and $2000. I read that article about a dozen times almost frothing at the mouth. I wanted to do that soo bad.

I could have my music, gps, on board diagnostics, internet, etc… all in one device, WOW that would be great!

Only one problem, it appeared to pricey for what it was. So that idea also became shelved.

I don’t exactly recall what got me back into it, but I had the urge once again to get back into figuring out how to put a carpc in my car.
Somehow I stumbled upon a website called mp3car.com that explained how to do a lot of it and they offered lots of components for sale there.

This got me thinking that this was very doable. So I looked over what they had to offer, some bare-bone kits, and already made kits.
Looked around in the forums a bit to see what everyone was doing. I stumbled upon a few YouTube videos of carputers in action and I was hooked, I had to do this.

I downloaded some software that’s used on your carpc on top of the operation system known to most hobbiests as a Front End. I messed with trials of Streetdeck and Centrafuse and the Free Open Source RoadRunner. I ran these programs on my computer at home and really liked how they worked and tweaked on them some and saw a lot of potential for add-ons later. This was looking really good to me as I like to know I am not limited by what a company tells me I can do with their product. I like to know I can change things to my liking when I want to.

So I put together a price list and it came to around 950$ at first jot. I had to figure out a way that this would not sting so bad. I was thinking “at least its not $1500 or $2000 like the magazine said”. I was trying to justify me doing this at $950, but I am a bit of a miser when it comes to money and I couldn’t live with myself if I spent that much.

Then a light bulb when off on how I could raise me some money. Here comes a small story within this story to get you up to speed.

One time in early summer 2006, there was an offer on the internet where the company ( well lets just not say) was giving away tiny hand held wireless routers to anyone that signedup.

I am going to make this part rather short. I received a lot of routers and sold them along with other items I had all for a profit on E-Bay.

I made  about $481.93. There may have been more, sometimes I would ship several items to the same person in a box, and I made some profit on shipping as well.

So I had around $481.93 + $300 my wife gave me for our anniversary (thanks darlin), I can surely get this project going now.

I shopped on E-Bay and got most of the items I needed there, some used and some new at great prices.

Here is a break down:

Used VIA EPIA M10000 Mini-ITX Motherboard + 1GB Memory
$118.61

7″ inch LILLIPUT TOUCHSCREEN MONITOR NEW 629GL-70NP
$182.50

M2-ATX Car PC Carputer Power Supply +VoomPC-2 Enclosure
$184.95

External Slot Loading USB DVD ROM/CD R/RW Drive
$72.24

NEW GlobalSat BU 353 USB Sirf III GPS Receiver
$53.95

Wide Night Vision Car Rear View Reverse Camera PAL/ NTSC
$24.24

Hitachi Travelstor – 100 gigabyte -2.5″ laptop hard drive from Newegg.com
$105.28
Then I needed some extension cables for usb and vga

10H1-01210 HD15 (VGA) Male / HD15 (VGA) Female (1)
10U2-02106EBK USB Type A Male / Type A Female, Exte (4)
$20.78

Labtec PC Mic

$18.94

Some 1/8 male to male audio aux cables from radio shack and some switches.
$44.00

Phoco Phone control software
$24.95

Grand Total at this point.
$850.44

Some things I already had were a Dlink Bluetooth Dongle and Dlink wireless pcmcia card.
That is what the carputer cost if at this point. Did I waste any money along the way? Yes, well not waste, but I did buy a few usb 4 port hubs that didnt get used and I had to buy a AC to DC converter to bench test everything.
I know you can sometimes hack and old pc power supply to do this, but mine didn’t supply the needed voltage to get this done.

Ok so now you know what it costs, and what components are used. Now let me show you what it does and can do.

I installed everything and set it up on a bench to install the softwares needed.
I already had a copy of XP that wasn’t being used on the pc that it came with (pc is toast) so I used that. Had I not, it would have added to the overall cost of this project.

I used n-lite and trimmed the fat off of Windows XP Pro. Proceeded to install it and all was fine.
Next I had to decide on what front end to use. A front end is a piece of software that loads up when the computer boots, and it allows you to easily navigate around your car pc using the touch screen.

I initially tried StreetDeck and its awesome but you have to have a proprietary bluetooth usb dongle in order to get it to work with your cell phone and its pricey at $199.99 , it also made my cpu run at 100% no matter what I did, I didn’t like that too much.

Here is a YouTube video on what StreetDeck is like. (everywhere you see a mouse cursor would actually be you touching the screen)

Then there was Centrafuse and its very pricey to at $275.00
Check out this guys setup, he pretty much as the same stuff I do.
http://potatoeskillme.com/Carputer

Here is the video that Kevin produced. I uploaded it here to YouTube because I noticed it didn’t always play from his site very well.

Here is a demo of RoadRunner running the Digital FX 2.0 Transparent skin from JohnWPB.
This is a wonderful skin and I am running the 2.5 version of it now.
Very excited to get the new 3.0 release soon.

Check out Guinos myspace, the maker of RoadRunner
http://www.myspace.com/RoadRunnerSoftware

I plan to make my own videos soon going through all the features of each program, so check back.

Now I know most you reading this are asking, whats the point?
Why put this in the car?
How can or could this benefit me?

Well let me get to that right now.

This will allow me to do/have:
1. GPS Navigation
2. DVD player

(I can rip some of my movies from dvd and place them on the hdd in small AVI format for my guests to view later while on trips or while I am parked.
Note: in most states its against the law to watch a movie and drive at the same time. I do not recommend it. Most semi carputer devices limit this activity to only working while in park, even setting gps destinations, fortunatly for me, this is my own creation and I can get around all that.)

3. Satellite Radio, that I can customize into as many custom favorites list that I want.
4. Internet browsing through an eligible cell phone or wireless 802.11 connection
5. Rip Music CD’s ( this is great for archiving )
6. Integrated Phone via Bluetooth ( I can make calls handsfree)
7. Voice recognition ( my computer talks to me and I tell it what I want it to do, like Knight Riders KITT)
8. Vehicle Maintenance Log
9. ODBII system
10. Rear View Camera
11. Any other webcam can be added to record video of your travels.
12. Rate Songs into a 1-5 star playlist and load them
13. Browse Pictures
14. Watch Live TV (need tv tuner card)
15. Store your entire music library on the carputers hard drive and never insert a cd again. Easily browse albums by name or cover art and play all or add differant songs to a custom playlists.
16. Other external application support

So why have all these components

when you can have it all in one place….

I know I am forgetting something as there is soo many possibilties.

I will update this page often so keep checking back.
I plan on posting some of my own personal video of mine in action soon.

Some things I must get sorted out are the microphone for my phone calls.
I hacked up a few and wasn’t happy with the result. What I must do is find one that does not make my bass feedback soo much.

Keep in mind this is nothing really new. Many cars are fastly coming out with computers in them to do a lot of the things that mine does, but they will have limitations, and mine is limitless. Also note that this can be put into any car, it is not bound to this one vehicle. If I sale the car and get something else, this will surely come out and go in the new ride easy.

There are many devices out there like the Pioneer AVIC-D3 that try and accomplish what I have.

Oh yeah lets not forget SYNC from Microsoft either.

Like I said this stuff is fast becoming the necessities in cars today and in the future.

Here are some of my pictures of my setup.
I really like where I have my screen mounted as its not in the way at all and I dont have to take my eyes off the road much at all to get things done.
I know I need to get on the wire mess asap, I will put it in a hose or something soon.

Rear View Camera

Thanks to all the helpful guys over in the forums at mp3car.com

That is where I obtained a great deal of help with questions I had, they are a wonderful group of enthusiasts over there.

This is probably my favorite thread in the whole place.

http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/rr-skins/93550-digital-fx-2-0-transparent-released.html