Digital dash

[Frederic Breitwieser]

Funny you say that... I've been working on that for a long time.  Though,
not using a laptop display, most of the one's I've seen are too large and
square for a dashboard.  I have four 5" diagonal NTSC color displays,
320x200 RGB pixels, @ 256 colors... Sharp... and attempting to make a
"generic VGA" card, that divides the 640x480 into four quadrants, 320x200
each (losing 80 lines at the bottom - no big deal), to display on the LCD
panels.  Then, I can mount them side by side, and draw analog or digital
gauges.

Been struggling with this for a while... I successfully made the VGA part
(ISA connector), but matrixing four NTSC video chips hasn't been a fun
experienced.  used two different Yamaha video chips as well as the old
Commodore 64 video chip (hey, its darn close in spec!).



-----Original Message-----
From: steve ravet
To: diy_efi at diy-efi.org
Sent: 4/25/00 2:17 PM
Subject: Re: Digital dash

Another idea, for $400 you could probably buy an old color laptop from
ebay, and write some software to display gauges.  That opens other
interesting ideas also, like running Diacom (or carbytes) right in your
dash, MP3 software, etc. etc.  A 16C74 PIC with 8 A/D inputs could
interface to the gauges, pass the info to the PC over the serial port,
and the PC draws the gauges.

--steve

Charles Morgan wrote:
> 
> Matt, I noticed in the new Summit catalog (pg 274) the "Intellitronix
> Create-A-Dash Digital Gauge Kit".  It's listed at $399.95, but
includes 6
> gauges, all senders except for the fuel gauge, and a sheet of smoked
> acrylic to mount the gauges.  The tach and speedo are 3-3/8" and the
> voltmeter, oil pressure, fuel level, and water temp gauges are
2-1/16".
> Two of the small gauges are 3-digit (water temp and  voltmeter) and
the
> other two are 2-digit.  By the time you're done designing your own
gauges,
> ordering the parts, building the printed circuit boards, etc., $400
might
> look cheap.
> 
> Charlie Morgan
> 
> At 10:02 AM 4/25/00 -0400, Matt Cramer wrote:
> >       I've been thinking about building a digital dash for my Dart.
While I
> >could put together a circuit on my own that does LED bargraph
readouts
> >without too much trouble, a three digit digital readout would be more
> >accurate.  Yesterday I decided to see if I could find any sites on
the
> >Internet that might list what kind of IC's might be helpful in such a
> >circuit.  I got as far as figuring out that I could use some kind of
off
> >the shelf 8-bit ADC, but is there some kind of chip that will take
the
> >output from an ADC and use it to control a (preferably three digit)
LED
> >display?  If so, what's it called, and who makes it?
> >       This would be enough for me to put together a digital
temperature gauge,
> >fuel gauge, or similar gauge, but I'm also wondering about
tachometers and
> >speedometers, as a digital tach would be a nice addition.  Is there
some
> >kind of IC that will accept the kind of signal I can get from the
> >distributor as an input, and return a value that corresponds to its
> >frequency, or something else I could use for this?
> 
>
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-- 
Steve Ravet
steve.ravet at arm.com
ARM,Inc.
www.arm.com
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