On a brighter note...

...I'm working on a car-related project this weekend.

The amount of cabling running around the dash of my Land Rover Discovery 2 Td5, from both the accessory power socket (Cigarette lighter socket) and the amateur radio installation in the car, is nuts, and gets in the way a fair bit (not in normal driving, but in plugging in the phone, the dash cam, and so on). Also, the darn window mounts for the phone and dash cam for some utterly weird reason aren't holding their grip, and keep falling off. So, it's time for a tidy-up.

At the same time, I'm future-proofing myself for some accessories I hope to install over the next couple of years, such as a winch, and external accessory lighting for such things as off-road driving in low-light or night conditions (it happens).

So, a dash box is the way I'm going. The inspiration for these are such products as the "Mud Pod" from Mud Stuff and the "Discovery Dash Console" from Raptor Engineering.

I'm fairly well trained as an electronics technician, being a Radio Amateur of thirty-plus years experience. I'm also a reasonable hand at vehicle electrical systems and installations, having played around with car electrical bits for many years. So, it seems to me that I can do a custom, future-proofed dash-top case for mounting a radio control head, accessory switch controls, power, and similar.

So that's what I'm planning to do this weekend.

I'm going to run a power lead from the fused accessory line up to the dash top, run it into an instrument case that I bought from Farnell, which will be large enough to mount USB power supply sockets, switches, and my two-way radio control head, securely, and tidily, with room inside for additional accessories over time, such as a Raspberry Pi for amateur radio usage (there are many digital modes that can be accessed using an analogue radio via computer), maybe even a HotSpot for my DMR hand held radio.

I need to get my hands on a few bits of hardware (that's Saturday taken care of!) for this project, but I already have most of the stuff I'll need.

I've managed (with a little help from other Disco owners) to figure out how I'm going to run the cables into the box. They're going to be run UNDER the dash board, up through the vents to the front of the rubberised coin tray, into the new dash box by means of a hole I'll drill in the base of the box. From there, the power wires will go to the 4 x USB power sockets (2 at the front, 2 at the back), the radio remote head control cable will be fed through another hole behind where I'll mount the control head on the front fascia panel of the box, and the external speaker cable will be run to the back of the case, where I'll mount the external speaker. I'm going to have to raise the front of the dash box by about 15mm-20mm, but that's because the dash itself curves down in a pseudo french curve to the front console panel. That's likely going to require some plastic card or similar.

I'm still none too sure where or how I'll be mounting the dash cam and phone mounts; I'm still looking into that.

More to follow!