Ok so I want to put a touchscreen monitor into a double-din sized area in the dash of a '94 bmw 325i. I want to be able to operate an Apple iBook laptop through the touchscreen. The touchscreen will serve no other purpose other than to operate the computer through, so it doesn't need to be a dvd player or nav or anything. I've seen a few companies such as Lilliput and Xenarc offering touchscreen monitors for carputers, but only for windows platforms. Does anyone know of any good companies offering touchscreen monitors with software for apples? I'm not familiar with Xenarc or lilliput, and would feel uncomfortable buying from them. Can anyone comment on their quality. I'm hoping to get a monitor with high enough resolution to read text documents on.
Also, the laptop will be in the glove box. Has anyone put a laptop in a glove box or a car in general before? People have told me that when I hit bumps in the road, the harddrive will skip and things like that.
Has anyone used one of those do it yourself kits where you turn a normal monitor in a touchscreen?
www.mp3car.com
They might have more info. As for apple, good luck. Most people that want to do things like this, either have money to pay for it to be done. Or they are smart enough to do it themselves. And this isnt something a normal installer might know either. As for the harddrive, it shouldnt skip, but the lifespan will fall from having the harddrive operating at the time that you are driving. Personally I'd go the extra distance and add audio through the laptop. If all you really want to do is use it for text, then you might as well take it out of the glove box and use it when your stopped. Cant read the same time you are driving. Both of those companies are pretty popular though, and good quality.
Oh I plan on using the laptop for everything. Someone told me at one point that a normal car audio monitor that is designed to play dvds would have too low of a pixel resolution to see text.
For the record, I plan on outputing the audio signal from the laptop into the audio input on my alpine CDA-9813 deck, and running rca's from there to my amps. This way I can take advantage of fade/balance, crossovers, time correction and other features in my head-unit that the computers single audio out line wouldn't offer. For financial reasons I don't plan on going all out with crossovers and eq's, Just the Laptop -) Deck -) 4-channel/sub amp.