The idea of putting a desktop computer in a car has been in my head since before I was old enough to drive. I can’t remember what I found first: the specialized software, the build logs, or the legendary mp3car.com forums.

In the early days, solutions were either primitive or prohibitively expensive. By the time I had my first car at 16, I purchased an Alpine CDA-9811 head unit that could play MP3-CDs. But 700MB just wasn’t enough for me. I wanted my whole library.

The Trunk PC Era

Using an adapter in the AiNet port in the back of the Alpine, I connected to the sound card of an micro-ATX computer tucked in my trunk, powered by a cheap power inverter. I created my own low-tech solution for power management: two simple relays. One powered by the head unit’s remote wire, and the other by the computer’s power supply. As long as one of the two was on, the PC would stay powered. This let the inverter keep running after the car shut off, until the PC would shut down. I used some serial port pin connected to the remote wire which signaled the PC to shut down when the head unit turned off, by now the details there are fuzzy. It was running Windows XP and Winamp, of course.

I couldn’t afford an in-dash display yet, but I had a Sony Ericsson T616. It couldn’t play MP3s (though it did let me load any MIDI file I wanted as a ringtone!), but it had Bluetooth. I found a Winamp plugin that presented a standard Bluetooth menu to the phone, allowing me to wirelessly control the PC in the trunk from the driver’s seat.

It was a total pain. Troubleshooting meant lugging a 40-pound CRT monitor out to the driveway to check BIOS settings. I remember once having that CRT buckled into the back seat while I went through a Taco Bell drive-thru. A friend of mine working the window just looked at the glowing monitor and sighed:

“Of course you’d do that, Timmy.”

The “Fine” Years and the Rise of Streaming

My next step was a Nokia6620 that could play OGG files. I had to order a hand-built proprietary cable just to get an 3.5mm connection and spent a small fortune on a high-capacity MMC card. It was… fine.

Eventually, I moved to an AT&T Tilt 2 with 3G. That changed everything. I set up a Subsonic server at home and started streaming my music collection directly to the car. But the “CarPC fever” hadn’t broken, I just finally had the money to do it right.

The Peak: Windows in the Dash

I decided to go all-in. I bought a long VGA cable, a dedicated double-din touchscreen, a DC-to-DC power regulator, and an extra battery. After struggling with a resistive screen, I found a capacitive upgrade that actually felt modern, but the wiring and power management was a headache. I drained that battery many times to the point of ruining it.

The masterpiece was an 8-inch Windows 10 tablet wedged directly into the dashboard. I found an adapter to map my steering wheel controls to Windows, stashed a 1TB hard drive behind the dash, and integrated the factory microphone so I could talk to Cortana. I had full Windows Maps and a desktop OS at my fingertips.

To handle power control, I used what I already had. Since it was a tablet now, I just connected the 5v adapter to switched accessory power and cobbled together an app that would automatically put the PC into sleep mode when it stopped charging. Since the tablet already woke itself up when charging started, I just had to simulate moving the mouse a bit to keep it awake.

It was exactly what I had dreamed of at sixteen. It was perfect.

But hardware in a car lives a hard life. Heat and vibration are the enemies of the tinkerer. Eventually, the tablet setup started to show its age, Windows discontinued Windows Maps navigation and “Hey Cortana,” I eventually replaced the OS with Android x86 and replicated most of the features, but it started to feel more like a chore. I don’t drive the car very much anymore, and my only plans for the car currently are re-installing the stock equipment to get it ready to sell.

My current work truck has CarPlay and Android Auto. I pay for YouTube Music. I did manage to geek it up a little bit by using a Raspberry Pi Zero to make the Android Auto wireless, but there’s no trunk-mounted towers, and no CRTs in the backseat. It just works.

I finally have the “perfect” car computer I spent twenty years trying to build, and it turns out it’s incredibly boring. I miss the troubleshooting. I miss the proprietary cables. I miss the fight to make the music play.

Because as it turns out, the joy wasn’t in the listening—it was in the building.