Installing My Monitors Into The Season One Frame

I started the process of installing the two five inch LCD screens I had on hand into the Season One Monitor frames I had gotten from Knight Scan. One of the screens is a GPS unit I got from a shop on eBay. The other monitor is just and LCD screen that can be hooked up to a computer. It's not a touch screen unfortunately, I'll need to look into getting one eventually but for right now this will have to do until then.

I began by using my Dremel to cut out and grind away some of the fibreglass inside of the monitor frames so as the screens would sit in the frames a little nicer. Once all that was done I added in some plastic spacers with some contact cement to make sure each monitor will site in the middle of the frames. I made a Lexan plastic plate to help secure the LCD screens into the frame, you can see it a little in the picture above resting just out side of and above the frame. I had cut holes into the Lexan plastic plate to allow for the LCD monitor boards to be fitted through.

After some fiddling about to make sure my holes cut into the Lexan plastic plate were going to work well with my LCD screen circuit boards I fitted it together to see how it will look. The boards for the simple LCD screen have a long ribbon cable on them so I can secure those in under the dash somewhere, the one for the GPS unit however is packed together pretty tight as I had dismantled it from a portable unit and you know how they love to pack all that stuff in tighter than a Nuns Bible lol. Anyways I had removed the rechargeable battery from the GPS and I'll have it rigged to just the mini USB power cable that came with the device. It was originally attached to a cigarette lighter plug that had a power adapter inside of the handle that converted the 12V DC into 5V DC. Now the cool think is that I already had a step down converter that pretty much did the same thing that I had bought from eBay for the little mini sound FX board I had bought from Adafruit. So I clipped off the cord that had the mini USB power cable on it and hooked it up to the out side of the 12V DC to 5V DC adapter and there we go, Bob's your Uncle, works like a charm. I'll further hook it up to the green "?" button on the lower console and use that to turn on and off the GPS unit.

Here you can see a shot of the GPS unit powered up installed into the season one monitor frames. It looks pretty good and once I get the frames finished off nicely and then painted I'll be able to install the whole shebang into the dash Finally! Like I say though it's most likely just for now until I eventually get the slightly larger tough screens that will work well with my dash software but hey.... for now it's pretty golden and I'm happy with how it's coming along.