Well, cold weather has been in the plains for the past few weeks … and so that means it’s time the blood starts churn­ing for severe weather. Not so much the storms, of course, but the prepa­ra­tion for the season.

First new item this year is what I’ve taken to call­ing the “baby com­puter.” It’s what will han­dle my live stream­ing and GPS this sea­son, replac­ing the Dell tower PC that was seat-belted next to the sec­ond row seat in the old van. That PC gave up the ghost late in the sea­son last year (actu­ally, all that’s bad about it is the CMOS bat­tery, but the 8-year jump in tech­nol­ogy in the PC that’s replac­ing it was just too good to pass up).

The new stream­ing PC gets the name “baby com­puter” because it’s so small. Com­pleted, it’s just a lit­tle larger than two reams of copier paper stacked on one another.

This is the view in the top of the PC. For a size ref­er­ence, look at the 1-quart cup just to its left.

This is the view in the right side. As it will be installed in the van, this will be the top.

I’m still wait­ing on the wi-fi card, which plugs in the cen­ter of the moth­er­board, then I’ll be ready to put the oper­at­ing sys­tem and other soft­ware on it.

I’ll be able to do about any­thing media-wise from this machine. It has a multi-card reader, so I can pull the SD card from my video cam­era, the Mem­o­ry­Stick Pro from my still cam­era, and pretty much any other for­mat. The reader also sup­ports a SATA hard drive, and has a USB port. But with six USB ports on the PC itself, I have more of those than I need. A bit of overkill on the FireWire card, too, though I could con­ceiv­ably plug in and stream two cam­eras using it. The FireWire port on my older video cam­era died a cou­ple of years ago, so I doubt I’ll be doing that. With a 500 GB hard drive, I’ll be try­ing to stream my Flash video to the drive as well as live, giv­ing me a backup to the Mini-DV tape in the camera.

But the most excit­ing thing is that it can run directly off the van’s 12-volt power. No more inverter! (Actu­ally, I’ll prob­a­bly drop 2 of the 3 invert­ers).  I’m going to mount it to a plat­form that con­nects to the well that’s between the second-row cap­tains chairs in the van, put some power fil­ter­ing and surge pro­tec­tion in the pack­age, and run the PC, the wi-fi router, the cell booster, and maybe one or more AA bat­tery charg­ers all directly from the 12V plug that’s right there in the well. Elim­i­nat­ing the heavy-duty PC power sup­ply and stay­ing at 12V will have a huge impact on my bat­tery and alter­na­tor drain/wear.

Add to it the DC-to-DC power con­verter I got for the lap­top, and we’re just about AC-free. I haven’t decided whether to try and run the cam­era bat­tery charger and the video cam­era off 12V or to leave them on an inverter this year.

That may be it for new stuff this year — we’ll see. But I’m pretty stoked about not need­ing all those invert­ers and wires run­ning all over the place … just a mod­ule that can go in and out of the van at will. Chas­ing setup ought to go from over an hour to 10 min­utes or less. That’ll be moti­va­tion to not leave the stuff in the van all sea­son, reduc­ing road-related jar­ring of the equip­ment. What’s not to like?!

I’ll have an update in a few weeks, when it comes time to make the mods to the van … I’m plan­ning to run some power to both sides of the wind­shield where we can power the scan­ner and our phones. Look­ing for­ward to it!