(click on images for larger version -- photos courtesy of Ecor Rouge Photography)
The Tribal Pizza concept started in mid-2003 with 4 words: "GPS to deliver pizza". At the time I was Chief Technology Officer of DuClaw Brewing Company, the #36 brewery in the world, according to ratebeer.com. I spent a lot of time writing software to manage restaurant operations and one day it occurred to me that pizza delivery could utilize more technology than any other type of restaurant.
Now it's 4 years later and Tribal Pizza lives. The heart of our delivery platform is our site. The brains is a computer that we call Pizza Box in each unit. The arms and legs, however, are The Carputer.
The Carputer is responsible for the following tasks:
- Routing deliveries and giving turn-by-turn directions.
- Updating the vehicle's location and estimated time to delivery on the main site in near real-time
- Monitoring vehicle performance, such as MPG, driving characteristics, and maintenance needs
- Presenting special delivery instructions to the driver
- Rocking out with XM radio
The photo to the right shows the Carputer in assembled form during development. You can see from the Blue Screen of Life that we're running Windows. We use XP Embedded since we have a lot of .NET development experience. The fingerprints on the screen attest to the fact that it's a touchscreen LCD. 
Most of the parts were purchased from mp3car.com. The XM Universal Tuner in the front was purchased at Best Buy and the wiring and power supply used for development were purchased at Radio Shack.
As it stands, the Carputer boots, runs our custom .NET application, and receives GPS data. In other words, it's alive but not particularly useful yet. As we add functionality, we'll be posting not only what's been accomplished, but some code and downloadable components. We keep telling ourselves that a lot of what we need should already exist, so we decided to give away some of the pieces, such as our .NET XM controller. 
To the right you can see all the parts that are going into the system and below is a close-up of the daughter-board that 
holds the hard drive. If you're going to put a computer into a car, play it safe and use a laptop drive. They're design to withstand more movement than your average desktop drive.
Any questions about the hows, whys, why-nots, etc. can either be posted in the comments or sent directly to me at jgrieves@tribalpizza.com.
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