Flutterby™! :

This article is why I read /., occasionally there's a gem. In this case two. Since the ditz in the delivery van took out Matilda, my BMW 528e, I haven't taken the time to put the CD player into Daphne the Nissan Maxima. I also miss some of the automation features Matilda had (mileage calculations, speed monitoring, stuff like that). It's not like I need another project, but in the "gosh, wouldn't it be cool" department, a mid-range Pentium with a couple of gig of hard disk space that played MP3s and to which I could add some measurement peripherals and eventually an LCD screen tied into a GPS receiver... Anyway, http://utter.chaos.org.uk/~altman/mp3mobile/ describes the construction of such a system, including a power supply (with vibration control, the hard part of automotive engineering). http://cajun.current.nu/ is another car audio jukebox. http://www.bangsplat.org/autolinux/ is a project to build mapping software off a common data set.