Comments on: Putting the Mac Mini in your dashboard

After all, it'll fit. After floating the idea, a car restoration firm's site experiences skyrocketing traffic.
Photos: The diminutive Mac Mini

[Jonathan]

I considered this for all of 2 seconds...

Until I realized that yah know MN winters ranging from the teens to neg twenty's it would kill the disk in the mini after a handful of cold (and I mean COLD) startups. Never mind summers where in a car it can get into the 100's pretty easily if you don't have the window cracked. And we won't even get into the whole theft thing.
Or then there is appropriately mounting a BT mouse and keyboard in a car in a meaningful manner. The conclusion I came to is even though I have enough skills to hack this into my car myself its not worth the trouble. Now I may reconsider if I get a Prius this summer. If I could hack the touch panel to work with a Mac Mini using the touch screen. That would be sweet.

[tnalls]

you could hack the mainboard to install a toggle switch to control the on and off function of the laptop or mini-pc and for cooling and heating install fans in the dash that turns on using a temp control or reverse the fans for heat since the laptop has to be cool all the time it would help to put fans in a series wireinto the vehicles temp guages or set a temp guage within the laptop or mac mini

hope this helps

How about this?

I thought the same thing even down here in balmy WI. Then I thought maybe an option to "un dock" the unit when you leave it in bad weather. It's small enuf to pop in a briefcase. Another option might be to have some sort of thermo control of the power. As for theft, I guess you could do a phoney radio dial kind of thing ... fake CD player would allow you to load & unload CD's (I'm assuming this thing would handle the audio for the car.

[dejo]

Too cold for the Mac mini? No problem...

"Another option might be to have some sort of thermo control of
the power."

Or better yet, how 'bout just a block heater for the Mac mini? ;)

He's not the first

Do a search on "mini-itx and car". Via has been making 17cm x 17cm motherboards with built-in processors for several years now. There are many car kits out there for audio and connectivity.

Home Theater Mac

If you are interested in plugging your mac into your home theater, go to: www.hometheatermac.com and find out how.