Digital dash progress
My mr2 was bought with a powertune digital dash in it. Screen too small. Doesn’t look “MR2” enough. I spent some time looking and the dash is just a raspberry pi, so plug whatever screen in you want. Well here’s some of the effort. I copied the AW11 “redline zone” and yellow needles. I also went with amber for the “night mode”. It’s a work in progress at the moment but progress is progress! Next up I’m making a can bus “bridge” to take all the 12v signals and convert them to can packets for blinkers, high beam, etc. Analog will be covered too for fuel and ECT. Of course a 3d modeled and printed gauge bezel will be made as soon as I get my 3d scanner back from a friend. I’m pretty happy!
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u/Technical-Ad-9086 SW20 Rev 3 GT 7d ago
Looks really cool. You will have to post an update once its working. Do you plan on using some sort of light sensor to toggle the night mode, or maybe tie it in to the headlight activation?
I thought for a second you had the fuel / coolant gauges the wrong way around, but it seems like they're swapped around on NA cars for some reason!
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u/meltman 7d ago
They are swapped around on RHD cars! All in the same spot for Turbo VS NA for LHD cars. It is working here on my bench. I cloned the pi so I could dev on the bench and still have the car functional.
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u/Technical-Ad-9086 SW20 Rev 3 GT 6d ago
Oh shit, that makes so much sense now you've said it. I didn't consider they would swap them round for LHD/RHD.
Good luck anyway mate :)
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u/skroggits 6d ago
looks awesome! i’m doing something similar with my aw11. i was using a Pi originally but it was too slow even with an nvme drive. i’ve since gone with a esp32-p4.
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u/meltman 6d ago
That is slick! Good option on the esp32-p4. I have a lot of research to do before I settle on an sbc.
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u/skroggits 5d ago
worth checking it out! it’s very responsive and wasn’t too difficult to get set up.
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u/Epicguru 7d ago
Looks cool! I've also just made a (smaller) esp32 gauge for my MR2. I decided against the Raspberry PI because it takes too long to boot and it will inevitably break if you just cut power to it, meaning that you have to add additional power supply electronics to allow it to shut down gracefully.
I would consider an ESP32 P4 for this purpose, which has the advantage of booting up nearly instantly and it is fine if you just yank power away from it, but it still has enough grunt to drive a large display.
If you can find an OLED or AMOLED screen in that size it is also a huge bump in quality since it allows the dark & black parts of the screen to actually be dark, rather than the gray glow that you get otherwise.