Thanks for the link Rio.
Only had a quick skim read, but looking at the way he's going about it, will be ages before he gets to market and it'll be typical of much commercial automotive stuff I buy, designed by computer nerds not by serious drivers.
It did trigger a possible solution to the sunlight readability of the dash replacement option. After Steve's comment about heat blanking I had toyed with the idea of retaining a mechanical needle for the speedo, but dismissed the idea as 'not spaceage enough'. Seems at least one well regarded manufacturer is already doing this:
Sirius wrote:
My view on graphics is don't bother unless its going to be really really good on a full colour TFT or similar.
In my view just a simple numeric display and an label is all thats required (Oil T 54) for example.
Many people witter on about gauges and having all the needles facing up when things are OK so you can do a quick visual check, to me that is fine, if you are living in 1980. The warning alarms are so you don't have to look at the display at all, unless you want to.
My thoughts exactly. My experience of competition / driving fast is that you don't have time to look at gauges at the critical moments such as hard cornering.
The planned display is 2 lines of 16 characters each. From memory (not driven the car in ages
) the top line is a text description of the sensor, bottom line is the value and units, plus 'high' or 'low' or 'mute' to indicate alarm status.
If a channel goes out of limits, the display will automatically switch to it. Pressing the enter button 'mutes' this channel until it goes back into limits (or engine off). All other channels continue to be monitored and can also generate an alarm.
In the event of multiple alarms, higher level will over-ride lower level ones and be displayed automatically.
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