08 June 2006
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XMobile was my attempt at fitting an Xbox games console into a car.
Stage 1: Mounting the LCD
The car in which I planned to fit the Xbox in was a Citroen Saxo. The LCD monitor was a 7" model taken from a Goodmans portable DVD player. Not the best quality but it does the job.
The first job was to find somewhere suitable for the LCD to sit. The dashboard in Saxos is made up of lots of curves so finding an area big enough for the LCD wasn't easy. In the end, it was decided that the best place would be above the radio in the centre console, this would mean relocating all of the buttons such as hazards and rear heater and building a framework up for the screen to sit in. You can see the progress below.
Stage 2: Modifying the Xbox
An Xbox uses mains voltage to run, 240V in the UK, so some changes would need to be made for it to run off the 12V car battery.
The original mains power supply was removed and replaced with a 12V Car PC Power Unit, an adaptor circuit was used to map the wires from the ATX connector to the Xbox connector and a remote power-on lead was added to run to the front of the car together with a remote USB lead for the infrared controller.
After testing the 12V power supply we found it was unstable and so decided to use a mains inverter and use the old Xbox 240V power supply.
Once the power unit was fitted, we added a relay to switch the power on and off via the car head unit from the remote out. This turns on the Xbox when the auxiliary input is selected on the radio.
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