Digital Instrument Clusters

[out2kayak]

Hello all,

A while ago, I floated the idea of a custom digital instrument cluster for resto-mods.

I figured I would circle back to show what I ended up finding when I did my market research:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/digital-instrument-clusters.html

Or, for lower end markets,

http://appcrawlr.com/android-apps/best-apps-oil-pressure

http://store.traqmate.com/TraqDash-Upgrade-p/930006.htm

Has anyone played with these?

[GriffithMetal]

Are you looking to buy a finished one or create a new one? I found this company http://www.id4motion.com/ at SEMA and they told me it would be around 20K for one of their clusters. I might be naive but I would think someone with the right knowledge could take a small monitor, a Rasberry Pi and create the same thing. There are some people creating CAN-Bus adapters using Arduino.
http://nolandeng.com/rs11.php
http://www.openhardwarehub.com/projects/40-Arduino-CAN-BUS-OBD-Gas-Gauge
http://www.xsimulator.net/community/threads/driving-real-gauges.3278/

51979307

[preston]

if you run megasquirt, you can use any Android device to create a fully customized dash display including all running engine parameters. From what I see here that is the easiest route to go, I am unclear how these other apps interface with the engine data. See here
http://www.tunerstudio.com/index.php/shadowdashmsmenu

You can make all sorts of dashboards with all sorts of graphics and every engine parameter you can think of and you can use the phones internal GPS or external GPS for g's, performance, etc. Its really quite impressive.

As I don't own any devices, I'm not sure how boot up time and charging would work in a car situation, but again from what I"ve seen this is one of the best solutions out there. Megasquirt can be a little more work to get installed and running because they don't sell as many canned solutions, but anyone here that is a hot rodder can do it no problem and diyautotune.com has made it a lot easier, and if you are familiar only with older MS installs you might be amazed what it now supports, I cannot really think of anything Holley, FAST, etc. offer that is not available in MS.

I'm running my car with full sequential low impedance injection, crank trigger COP ignition, knock sensing, boost control, etc.

[out2kayak]

I was considering creating my own. Creating the UI software is pretty easy using QT (https://qt-project.org/) or similar APIs.

From a hardware perspective, there are many system on chip that will do 1080p and are really reasonable in price and support an RTOS, if needed.

Effectively, I was thinking of pull together the hardware that would bolt behind a Camaro or other gauge bezel and have the UI presented there. The software would have a canned look but could be customized for some coin.

Boot time is pretty easy to control. The harder part is shock / vibe / thermo / power and potentially latency (esp in an indirect driving scenario), but all of these can be overcome.

With the System on Chip (SoC) solutions available and the capabilities they can provide and meeting the above challenges for just a few bucks more, I'm not sure that a Raspberry Pi would really get you much -- especially if you look into all the other work you'll need to do to get it up and working.

From the MegaSquirt perspective -- I was thinking more in the controlling the dashboard verses EFI and a mobile device controlling it.

Anyhow, basically I talked myself out of doing it because there was already solutions on the market already. I'm surprised about the $20k, though. Seems like it's priced way high for what's provided, IMHO. I've delivered I7 based systems in vehicles for less.

[CarterHickmanDesigns]

You could check out windriver RTOS and their VxWorks suite. It has support for CAN built in as well as Tilcon graphics suite. I have spent way to many hours researching this exact same thing about 3 years ago but times have changed and I do believe that is more feasible now than before.

http://www.windriver.com/products/platforms/automotive/

also check out palmerperformance.com

Carter