PC's and EFI

[Robert Harris]

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On to the subject of PC's in automobiles.  First, a small bonafide.  I build
about a dozen custom built PC's a week, and have built or repaired literally
thousands of them.  The care and feeding of PC's is my second line -
primarily Aerospace Software Weenie.  I have more than a clue about them and
an extensive enough hardware and software background to understand them.

If money is not an object or being technically cute is - go for the PC-104 -
I'm happy to let you pay ten times what I do for stuff.  Same for the
"Industrial" catalogs - which feature ancient crap at excessively ridiculous
prices - like two hundred dollars for a three year out of production video
card that was originally available Chinese at 20 bucks.  In fact, unless you
have good Chinese sources maybe you ought not even consider a PC because
believe me - you are or will be raped. The Computer Shopper, PC Magazine or
whatever prices are bending you over.  No good sources - don't bother.  And
after having seen most of the crap being sold as "industrial", believe me,
it is mainly obsolete consumer stuff that someone couldn't dump. Buyers and
engineers are such easy marks. Only thing easier is to sell a black mega
power system to a Lawyer or Doctor.

Current reasonable prices - Pentium MMX motherboard - about 85 bucks - Intel
166 MMX about a 110. Fan about 5 - say two hundred bucks and falling for an
excellent motherboard.  With on board IDE, PCI, Floppy, Serial, Parallel,
PS-2 mouse, IR, and USB, flash BIOS and 512K on board cache.  Size - baby
AT. 32 Meg ram - about 70 bucks or less.  2 gigabyte hard drive - just over
$100.  Yada Yada Yada CHEEEP  CHEEEEPER  CHEEEEEPER YET.  The negative
voltage's needed current draws are small enough to build a dozen power
supplies and use the commercial stuff and still save mega bucks.

Your problem is VIDEO.  If you plan to use any off the shelf software, you
are going to need a display.  Now a CRT is cheap - about 160 for a 15" .28
SVGA - but dah - it really sucks bouncing around on your seat.  So buy
yourself a nice DIY or Industrial flat panel at 5 times the price or more.
If you DIY, you need to be a MSCD to write the device driver so the rest of
your software can run it.

Software choices are DOS - ancient history and mainly the reserve of the
cantankerous (and no bull crap about excellence or adequacy or whatever -
DOS and Windows 3.x are as dead as CPM - join reality), Windows 95 or Linux
(do yourself a favor - do EFI_332 if this is your choice).

The option of writing your own operating system exists ONLY if you do not
want ANY commercial software to run on it. A compromise if you plan on no
upgrades is to take DOS 6.22 and any device drivers, accept the fact that
you probably will never be able to upgrade and live with it.

If you are writing your own and you get this gleam in your eye about the
bios - reality check. The BIOS is written for specific chips on the mother
board and they are all different and extremely hardware dependent.  If you
got years of time and documentation that generally is not available to the
public (do you buy 50,000 chipsets ? no - forget it not worth the chip
makers time to provide you the documentation - plus a lot of it is covered
by trade secret/copyright protected or at least a major bond and
non-disclosure) you might write your own before the 5 year life expectancy
chips die.  And at 85 bucks for a good motherboard with everything working,
I doubt that many are perverse enough to pursue this dead end - but have
fun.

And start up time - I really love this "Concern".  Do you think your ECU
"starts" cold every time you turn the ignition on? Try disconnecting the
battery and see what happens.  Boot the damn thing when you hook it up, let
it go into the power save (notebook give you a clue?) mode and live with the
milliamp drain to keep it alive.  Any interrupt can trigger it back alive.

And storage devices - another phony baloney.  Almost all aircraft computers
run with program in ram - reloaded only when updating.  With more ram than
you can imagine cheap, just leave it in ram and boot/reboot from a floppy -
or better yet a 120 meg IDE LS-120 removable hard drive. All hard drives are
rather rugged compared to 5 years ago - but for 40 bucks, you can get a kit
that makes is almost vibration proof.  But, then be a good dweeb - pass on
it and spend a thousand bucks for a "RAM DISK" or some other industrial
nonsense.

I could go on for days about this, but don't bother.  The only practical way
to run a PC in a car is a NOTEBOOK.  Any other package will cost you much
more for much less. It already runs on 12 volts (option available), it
already has a supported display, it already is ruggedized and vibration
resistant and you can use some of the ports to interface to whatever.  It
even gives you a chance of having it working before the asteroid arrives.

Keep in mind that a Pentium 166 (which ain't even heavy duty any more) is
several thousand times faster and more powerful than a 4.77 MHz PC.  In
fact, it is more powerful than any early eighties supermini computer and far
more powerful than the seventies supercomputers. Along with this power comes
a lot of complexity and massive overkill.

All of the above is why I am considering stamps and pics to build my own
system - in small, doable modules.  I prefer to de-complicate defecation.
But what the heck do I know anyway.