Would this work if we wanted to go digital?

[Timebender]

Saw this on hackaday.com. http://hackaday.com/2010/03/16/keep-...ithout-obd-ii/

Anyone know if this would work? Would it be best to add the megasquirt?

Thoughts and comments? There was another post to this: http://www.nvidia.com/object/digital...-clusters.html , which would then let you create a true custom digital dash display for the DeLorean, if we could get the other information needed from the car.

Greg

[SEO Motorsports]

Megasquirt monitors all of that and can send it to a digital display over a CAN bus.

[Timebender]

RPM's, Lambda and everything? Hmm, going to need to learn more about it.

[jangell]

I've been looking into something along these lines for a long time, but keep getting sidetracked with other things.

MegaSquirt requires that you use it for fuel control (and optionally spark control); getting information out of it is just a bonus. I'm doing an EFI conversion anyway (once other unrelated issues are resolved on my car), so this covers all of the engine information that I was looking for.

Anything that isn't engine related you'll still have to do through some other means, like that Arduino system you linked to. In fact, I'm planning on doing a custom Arduino setup to monitor everything I can think of -- head lights, turn signals, fuel level, battery, climate controls, current gear, etc.

For a user interface, I was planning on writing a custom app on OS X using SceneKit to get 3D graphics and such as the instrument cluster, coupled with an iPad in the center console as a touch screen interface. I was going to use either USB or Bluetooth to communicate with the Arduino modules and the MegaSquirt. This would all be custom code, though.

The Nvidia system you mentioned seems to be more of a concept, or intended for automative manufacturers. I couldn't find any information about it being available to end users.

If you want a simple interface and to only monitor engine information, the converting to EFI with MegaSquirt and displaying its output on a PC with one of the (many?) applications that can read MegaSquirt output.

If you want something flashier, one option to consider might be a game engine, since those have high-level tools to make interfaces, although you'll have to figure out how to get it to read the MegaSquirt information (writing a plug-in to read data from the serial port, basically) and make it less of a game and more like a kiosk (there's info on doing this on the net; it's one of the things I researched). Another option might be Javascript with node.js, and just run everything in a web browser (say, on a Raspberry Pi); I researched this one for a bit until I decided Javascript couldn't let me do the 3D graphics I wanted to (but will let you do nice 2D animations, and there's lots of libraries to make that easier), but depending on what you're looking for it might be a good way to go. I decided to go with SceneKit on OS X because it gives me game engine like functionality with high-level programming APIs while while giving me full access to the to the full suite of OS X programming APIs, but it means writing a completely custom app from scratch. Mind you, I haven't coded any of this yet, and my plans might change (for example, when SceneKit is supported on iOS, I might just run everything on an iPhone or iPod Touch plugged into an external display).

No matter what you're looking at doing custom code and building some custom hardware (although Arduino isn't too complex; I'm more of a programmer than an electronics guy, for example, and I find it fairly straight-forward), at least if you want more than MegaSquirt engine output and a relatively basic PC display.

-- Joe