Hair brained car ideas

[Messiah]

Ok now when i ever i drive or just get bored i have a tendancy to sit and ponder random things.... mostly geek stuff and my car. On occasion something in my mind breaks and the 2 combine and out comes some outlandish idea. Now this isnt unusal.... but then,very rarely, one come up and i think "that just might work.... be pricy tho.... but hey..".

Now i'm not the only one who does it.... i've seen the rest of you do it. stuff like feeding air conditioning in air intakes etc.... infac i'll get back to that one later.

So i thought i'd start a thread to discuss hair brained car things we dream up that just might work.

heres a few i've couple i've come up with.

1. Cascade vapor phase cooled air intake and or intercooler.

Now as mentioned before... people have asked "hey can i cool my intake with my a/c?" and as we all know the answer is "no, it drains more than it makes". easy... but the idea was good... the problem was the approach... this is a car... ideas need balls... Now in the computer world we cant drive our pc's down the road and 120 the get a wind chill factor to cool the cpu's. So to crank up the speed.... we go nuts on cooling. In facts we're at times geeks are the kings of cooling.

The solution is this.... a range of refrigeraters use a cooling system called vapour phase cooling. to make it short its a cranked up use decompressing a liquid into a gas at a high rate there for cooling, to about... - 80 kinda weak . now this was my idea.... for hard core fans only.....

A Cascade vapour phases system works like this it uses 2 condensors and 2 evaporators. Where as the normal system (vapour phase cooling) just condenses to air, this system uses a second evaporator to cool the condensor of the first...

Basically. Whack the condensers on either side of the inter cooler intercooler, normal condenser on the front, cooled condenser on the back. the cooling element of the normal condenser is intergrated into the rear condenser. now your thinging.... but thats still not gonna cool that second condenser enough... but heres the twist.. the final element is placed against the back of standard air intercooler or inside a water cooler if thats used. this would hopefully have the effect of drastically cooling the air entering the engine

Normal vapour phase cools to -80... cascadeding it cools to around -140... now this is in normal enviroments.... so we'll have to scale for space a little, so that figure might drop. and thats only the temp of the final element... not what we're cooling. so where ever u place that element will effect its effincency. options are intercooler or air intake.

for space the rest of the system would prolly need to be away from the engine.

and no before u shoot me i dont expect -140 degree engine intake temps.

but besides that please shoot as many holes in it as u like

Idea number 2 - HUFFDUFF for cars.

Mount directional radio antennas on cars linked to gps'd lap tops with gprs phones.

The antenner tracks the strength of the signal to find which direction its coming from.... the lap top maps this direction as a bearing and at marked intervals up loads it and its own gps cordinates to a server on the net (via gprs phone).

the server takes this signal information and triangulates the signal sources useing this trangulation and the gps locations of the cars these signal sourves can easily be mapped to a graphical map and displayed on a web server.... which... in tern can be viewed by the lap tops in the cars. kinda like peer to peer cop scanning the more people who equipe it the greater the accuracy of the system and its range. tuned to various frequencies you could pinpoint pretty much anything.... warships .... aircraft... or... cops. peoples software woulds always show a map of the area around the gps location of the car. to various scale. thats easy stuff... also as an icq kinda thing ppl could shere there gps location info with friends so they too show on the map... cute eh?

alrighty thats 2 of mine.... your turn...

[Chef_32]

I love it. 2:30 in the morning think about this stuff. its nearly 10am, and i can hardly think properley. I like the idea of the of the condensor, would be very interested to see it implemented. the GPS thing i kinda don't get, maybe in a couple of hours.

My Idea was (a couple of years ago): I wanted to get a computer in the boot of my car ( like a tower) hook it up to the auxilliary of my headunit, and run it as am MP3 player. Obviously it would be connected to one of those LCD screens which i would have like to be mounted on the sunvisor.

And, eventually, when i got a after market engine management system, i'd hook it up to the same computer, and use the info provided in the form guages which would come up in the screen.

Keyboard and mouse you might be thinking... Well infra red foldable keyboard, and a touch pad mouse mounted on the side console or driver door...

Tell me if you think i'm an idiot

any criticism welcome

[red900ss]

My alternatives to point 1.

* Remove: spare wheel (replace with compressor and can of goop), boot lining, everything from the glovebox and centre box, coins, loose mats.

* Replace seats with light weight ones and battery with small, light hi-tech unit.

* Operate with 1/4 tank fuel max, 1/4 tank washer fluid

* Pump tyres up

There's a 30kg benefit in the fuel alone.

2. You can buy hand held GPS/UHF radios that have this feature.

[red900ss]

...

My Idea was (a couple of years ago): I wanted to get a computer in the boot of my car ( like a tower) hook it up to the auxilliary of my headunit, and run it as am MP3 player. Obviously it would be connected to one of those LCD screens which i would have like to be mounted on the sunvisor.  

And, eventually, when i got a after market engine management system, i'd hook it up to the same computer, and use the info provided in the form guages which would come up in the screen.

Keyboard and mouse you might be thinking... Well infra red foldable keyboard, and a touch pad mouse mounted on the side console or driver door...

Tell me if you think i'm an idiot

any criticism welcome

Just don't run a Microsoft system or you'll be crashing twice a day.

[prae]

My Idea was (a couple of years ago): I wanted to get a computer in the boot of my car ( like a tower) hook it up to the auxilliary of my headunit, and run it as am MP3 player. Obviously it would be connected to one of those LCD screens which i would have like to be mounted on the sunvisor.  

And, eventually, when i got a after market engine management system, i'd hook it up to the same computer, and use the info provided in the form guages which would come up in the screen.

Keyboard and mouse you might be thinking... Well infra red foldable keyboard, and a touch pad mouse mounted on the side console or driver door...

i think thats been discussed in the Car audio section before O.o

MStation has car MP3 players, but not sure about the engine management

and

HKS have a monitoring system similar to the screen used in the R34 GT-R's

much~!

[Chef_32]

Just don't run a Microsoft system or you'll be crashing twice a day.

hahaha

You got a good point there.

[Chef_32]

anf yeah, i realise that most this stuff is readily available nowadays, but it wasn't when i got the idea. And this setup can also perform minor tweaks to the ecu while driving.

[nmcmahon83]

To the aircondensor theory.... I may be wrong, but doesnt that take a lot of power to run. The difference between a car and a computer is that computer cooling doesn't run by taking power away from the computer.

Where are you going to get the power to drive all those compressors etc?? with a computer, you have an endless supply of electricity... A car can only produce so much power (unless you have a giant aerial from the roof of your car connected to the power lines above similar to a dodgem car

my 2c.

[Messiah]

yeah the power demands of the compressors are a draw back... hmm... if only i knew its exact voltage requirements. heh might end up with a car that would do flat 9's tho. if only the battery didint run flat after 4secs or less.

As for the huffduff idea... currently with a polica scanner u can hear what the cops are saying... but you only know where they are if they happen to say it over radio.

The idea of the huffduff for cars is to use radio receivers mounted on a number of vehicles to trangualte the location and then map it to a graphical map on a web server. that way you'd have a gps like map of your area with the last known location of any cop who's used his radio since the last update. the more users (radios receivers) the more acurate the cop location due to more points of triangulation.

Could be cute... driving along... navigaiting using the map on the lap top screen when up comes a whole bunch of blue dots on the map on the road ahead of you. "Ahh that must be an rbt or defect station... i'll turn left here and go around them".

Also it beats radar detectors as they only pic something up once you close enough to start copping their radar waves.... this would be range inspecific, if a car can "hear" the signal, it can get a bearing for it, and if 2 or more cars get get bearings for it, those barings can be triangulated and then mapped, once every say 5 mins (time taken from the centralised server to stop discrepancies and bearing drift) so u end up with a map of say sydney with every radio transmitting cop within ranges location graphically mapped.... hmmm think i;ve repeated myself... but i cant be arsed going back and fixing it... but i hope this clarifies my original ramble a little.

[risk taker]

Chef_32: I was reading your idea about the in car computer and i think this site mightbe interesting.. its a group of people that actyually put computers into cars. theres some crazy stuff there.

www.mp3car.com

[ferni]

No offence, but the computer in the car has been done many times - got a couple of mates that have had it for a couple of years... not hard at all..

the other ideas - not bad, keep em coming

[Eug]

this is an old thread?

oh well... problem with the computer is the constant bumping and moving around of the

car... (i havent tried this), but i dunt think your computer will last very long..

[phorj]

put the computer on a rubber / foam base.

I've done this with my sub and amp in the boot of my R33. doesn't move around... doesn't get hard jolts... and can still get to the spare tyre easily (if I ever need to)

[Dynamix]

Lap top. Simple... although lap tops are quite expensie you can get power addapters that run from the lighter plug for constant power, also you dont need a super fast laptop to run mp3's and simple data, something like an old 800mhz p3 laptop will do and you can get them for $800 these days with good extra's. Also by using a laptop you have everything in the one package, screen, mouse, keyboard... it's a good option and you can remove it from the car for other uses. It would save alot of fiddling around in the long run and be just as affective.

[Chef_32]

Yeah, I know this has already been done, but i'm yet to see the ecu being programmed by a computer built into the car whilst on the road.

Laptop is a good thought, but its like having a boom box in the back seat (IMO). I'd much prefer the gadgetry of the computer being built into the car, rather than brought into the car.

This has always been a thought excercise for me, never got into actually making it ( wanted to do it in a Gen 2 CRX, but got a r32 instead. I considered a bunch of possibilities, including the fact that the bumps will upset the computer. Phorj has got the right idea, with the rubber; there are many ways to soften the impact on the computer.

There are heaps of other possibilities that come with the comp idea.

Web cams mounted during spirited drives, jump on forums at traffic lights, download music, etc.

[V8skylineMAN]

harebrained idea......i blew my 1.2 litre 4cyl RN20 hilux up last week.....so i pulled the engine out today...turned around to get the hammer(for some quick mods) and spied my l24e sitting in the corner......"hmmmm" i thought, that just might fit.....long story short i now have an l24e sitting in there and a bloody great hole in the firewall....

[OKBANANA]

A Touch Screen TV That can get TV (Channel 7, 10, SBS etc) Has this been done?

[ylwgtr2]

heres mine I built up my datsun 1200 ute bare metal respray ect after modifying the lip araound the tub(removed the tie on hooks and factory crappy upright standing seem weld around the tub)i drove it for 1 month or so the one day got the grinder out and chop topped the roof....i removed the rear firewall and moved the whole cabin back a few inchs this allowed the roof to come down 2 inchs while sloping the a pillars back.Then i copped a brain wave and built an IRS using a subaru diff centre with a custom made cradle that bolted into the original leaf spring mounts so no body mods at all　 then i made upper and lower A arms and used pulsar front stub axles with discs and calipers.Made a composit drive shaft out of subaru and pulsar shafts and used 2 x16 compression and 16 rebound adjustable shocks from a late model KX80 motorcross bike...it worked a treat!But that wasnt enough so i got a suzuki vitara transfer case and took all the guts out of it and joined the PTO type setup inside with 3 double row cam chains and gears from a ford V8 the bolted that on the flange on the front of the diff.This gave me an offset direct PTO to run up to the front for a constant 4WD setup.I then took a series 4 non turbo RX7 engine out of my clappered out old EX aussie post B2000 mazda and had planned to shoe horn it in there....i havent finished it yet as i need to make a front end similar to the back end up but it should be fun when i finally get around to it

Theres pics of it around here on SAU somewhere i posted them a while back

[Cubes]

I like Idea Number 2...

Once wireless becomes mainstream things should become interesting.

[chaos]

yeh sock it is possible to get normal tv....i think strutto has tried it but he said the picture was shit