Mainstream Gauge alternative
 

Hi all

I know the guy who posted this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkvo2JJrAjk

He owns a Landrover but has modified it and basically says if you can get a sensor for it he can program the output on these screens. He's been monitoring boost and did the inclinometer for fun.

I've looked how much defi gauges are and how much the cheaper gauges are recently before he even mentioned these. I started asking questions. What would you like to see one do? I asked if it could give an audiable alarm if for example a water temp hit a limit. It can. So, what would people like to see. I'll use the answers and he's going to develop me a prototype. The one in the vid isn't limited to 3 outputs, you can toggle through many.

PS I'm pretty new to gauges and monitoring so need some suggestions.

Cheers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRX4mIRZ1U4

slightly better vid

I'm the bloke he's talking about.

Just thought I'd add a photo of the current system in car and working:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...=w1192-h894-no

The photos is from an old version of the code before I'd hooked up any sensors so ignore the values for now. Things have moved on a fair bit as the test bench version in the video that The Grift linked shows.

The OLED screens used are quite small (0.96 inch across) but larger ones are available, and tbh any type of screen can easily be used. It's even pretty simple to drive stepper motor clocks.

The small screens are quite 'stealth' but offer fantastic viewing angles and brightness, they look great at night. I'm mainly interested in receiving alarms (flashing icons and sounding a buzzer) if thresholds are exceed which is why I wasn't too bothered about the size of them.

Me and The Grift will be looking at how best to get something useful into his Scooby soon.

This looks promising, however it would need to be on a big screen for it to be worth using for me.

In reality we have the Toucan which does exactly this but reads direct from the ECU.

I would want the functionality of the toucan but with a bigger screen....

It's pretty easy to hook up any type of screen.

I quite like these slightly larger full colour OLED's -> https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1pcs...08.4.71.tVPxzr

10x the price of the monochrome OLED's though.

Larger TFT are also easy to hook up, but they are a bit dim imho.

I guess it all depends on whether people just want information, or if they also want it to look bling.

OBD2 is also pretty straightforward, there are chips that will talk to any compliant hardware - I guess not all scobby's have that though.

Toucan is by far the best option for this kind of thing

I'm sure it's pretty good.

The Grift and I thought it might be kinda cool to make something ourselves for a fraction of the cost.

It'll be fun to keep you guys updated on progress in here.

I would be talking phone sized screen... That is still smaller than a toucan

Quite a bit of progress.

It's now able to read OBDII PID's via bluetooth from an ELM327 OBD dongle (this covers most vehicle use cases).

Beefed it up to run on 8 OLED displays.

Big text for most commonly changing data, RPM, Speed, Boost, etc.

Fair bit of graphical tweaking to be done but it's getting pretty functional now. Not as pretty as Toucan of course.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/OA...w1375-h1031-no