All Communications/Entertainment.
Gauges, engine, transmission, transfer-case, and differentials are all manual or self-powered (mechanical) so basically anything that's not headlights, brake-lights, wipers, or the starter or fuel pump are not critical in this truck's electrical system design - and thus expendable for survivability. Everything else is considered "luxury". For example I have a smart-phone as a backup for both communications and entertainment - other passengers would likely have them also (wife does).
It's not as difficult as the industry would have you believe. USB is four wires (power, ground, and a differential data pair), the Retina display is Embedded DisplayPort (eDP), which is basically DisplayPort (digital VGA replacement) - if you can trace out military numbered wiring you can deal with DisplayPort. Once an adapter is made, an eDP panel just plugs into a standard video card with DP output. There are hack articles for anyone trying to do this too - the backlight driver is the only difficult part, but since I needed to do sun-light readable and NVIS-A with the same panel, I needed to hack one together anyway for a completely custom backlight.
The antennas for the truck will be doing CB/FM/Weather/2G/3G/4G-LTE/AWS cellular data (standard COTS USB modem with external antenna ports) plus 2.4/5.8GHz WiFi. For the WiFi, I will also try to make the computer a
Broadband-HAMNET mesh node (selectable). There was a classified ad where I was looking to buy broadband antennas from anyone which was unsuccessful, but I found an antenna vendor that is going to work with me directly on the purchase (not Shakespeare or Valcom-Gulph by the way, got the cold shoulder from them). I'm locked-in under NDA with the vendor, but I can say without getting myself into trouble that the antennas I'm using are one of the antenna types that appears on this model MRAP (and no, I won't tell you if you guessed right):
CarPuter is all commercial-off-the-shelf parts:
- Asus Z77 Mini-ITX platform
- Intel IvyBridge CPU
- Nvidia Quadro NVS510 (4x mini-DP outputs)
- 16GB of RAM
- 512GB of SSD
- Azurewave AW-CE123H Bluetooth 4.0 + 802.11a/b/g/n/ac
- Pantech USB 2G/3G/4G-LTE/AWS modem (Verizon)
- 250W Mini-box automotive DC-PSU
- XMOS mutichannel USB audio digital out
OS is Hardened-Linux-From-Scratch running virtual machines via KVM/QEMU - the dashboard will have Android running as a guest VM running completely out of RAM. This will give me a slick interface for Navigation, webpages, VoIP, and media playback (via Google Play, or Spotify Premium, or Pandora, or others...). If I get really desperate for bandwidth in the middle of nowhere, I can always plug in a sat-terminal (those are standardizing around Ethernet too
).
My day job is in computers (please read my disclaimer), so the computers stuff comes very easy to me.
[EDIT:] Yes, I plan to have the truck Lojack'd before I street it. And I am building a custom security system for it. [/EDIT]