Re: In car PC with LCD question

["chrisdeighton" <Chris@xxxxxxx>]

John,

I have a (desktop style) PC in the boot of my car for GPS and MP3,
and a motorised in-dash monitor from Alpine. It's a composite video
monitor, so I use a graphics card in the PC that has composite video
out to feed to the display in the front.

I initially had trouble getting it all to work properly - The
problem I was experiencing was similar to yours in that I got a
picture on the display, but it was in black and white. I was using
an ATI graphics card, and no matter how I messed with the settings,
I couldn't get it to display in colour.

I also found that the ATI card did give a colour image when
connected to a different display, so there was either something
strange about the composite signal is was sending, or the colour
decoding circuitry inside the Alpine display was being particularly
fussy about that particular composite signal.

Eventually, I tried two different graphics cards - another ATI
(which didn't work) and an S3 PCI card, which initially only
produced a black and white image, but after tweaking the settings,
now produces a colour image.

So, my final conclusion was that the Alpine composite video decoder
circuitry appeared to be fussy about the flavour of composite video
it would receive. (Or, it could have been something relating to how
the monitor and PC were/weren't grounded.) Maybe the same is true of
your LCD display? Would it be possible for you to try a VGA to
composite video converter instead?

Interestingly, I recently had a problem of the display reverting
back to a black and white image. I managed to solve this by wiggling
around the cable between the PC and the display. Not very
scientific, but it did the trick. I'm not using a proper 75 ohm
video cable (just a cheap audio phono cable), so I'm beginning to
wonder if that might have some bearing on the problem.

For what it's worth, I've been using Sony's Streetmate software with
my GPS for routeplanning and moving map display. It's OK on a video
resolution screen, although the road names can be a bit hard to read
at times - takes a bit of practice! However, Streetmate gives spoken
instructions as well, so I don't need to look at the display too
often. I control MP3 playback using a Sony Joystick (the type you
can buy for Sony head-units), so I don't need to look at the display
much for that either. (FYI, the display is a 7(?) inch widescreen,
and I run the S3 card at a resolution of 720x480...)

As for extending the laptop display, I believe other people have
done this successfully, but I imagine it depends on the exact design
of the laptop you have as to whether it'll work properly.

If you haven't already found it, you may find some relevant
information in the bulletin board section of www.mp3car.com (linked
>from
when I was putting my system together.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Chris.