quote Originally posted by Riceburner98: Not me... I love the look of Cliff's dash though, is there anything he doesn't do a great job at??? I'm currently swamped with making HVAC stuff, would love to make them but would never have the time. Turns out making 1, 2, or 3 pieces like this is fun and can be done, but when you try to turn it into a business... Good bye any and all free time. At least in my case. Also you always get more people that say "I love it, gotta have one as soon as they're done!" then actually follow through and buy in the end, something always comes up.. I've got a huge pile of LED displays and chips left from when I was going to make the HUD units.. After selling a dozen or so it completely dried up, and those were only $50-$60. I get pinged every now and then on those, but just don't have the time to stop and build one for the $. Hopefully the HVAC's sell as well as they should, I have 500 LCD displays in the living room that need a home. LOL Hope to see these clusters in more Fieros in the future! (And I want to see what Cliff's other ideas for the dashboard will be!)

Hey if you need cash, there's a million things you could do to my fieros... Uh OT.

I tried to look up AEX Electronic and I came up with APEX but no AEX. I really love that dash and would love to get one but not for $12,000. <lLOL>

Got to keep this fresh in Cliff's mind! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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quote Originally posted by BMTFIERO: WOW, WHAT DO WE HAVE TO DO TO GET THIS OUT TO THE MASSES?!?!

I am certian that if you made Cliff an offer he could not refuse he would sell them to you. I'm betting $200,000 would cover buying the Idea and documents and probably get you ramped up for manufacture.

I'd buy them but I would like to change it a bit. the Great guy in Florida making the one decent red LED based gauge replacement for the fiero has several options for boost meter and other added gauges. If he could combine the two and find a china board house to have the boards made and stuffed it could be sold for a very fair price. (Note: his ARE a very fair price. $500.00 for a dash conversion like that is cheap, talk to the hotrod guys on their costs.)

How many Digital dashes actually exist? Have any of these made it state-side? Cliff..... PLEASE provide the details to a person/company who can produce these. Awesom!

Cordially,
Kevin

quote Originally posted by kevin: How many Digital dashes actually exist? Have any of these made it state-side

There were only eight ever made and all of them were sold here in the Netherlands. A few (3) of them had small problems but I'm convinced that had to do with the quality of the circuit boards which I had etched myself. And honestly, the seven(!) circuit boards are really a bit too complex to make yourself:

hey cliff what do you use to light the ledgend? also what is the display above the speedo? you dont have it lit up on any of the "in car" photos.

I'd replace the DIP electronics with surface mount and could probably reduce component counts in 1/2 by using current electronics. I'd also get rid of the dot matrix led displays and use a reverse REd backlit LCD like you find in all the current pontiac cars. Wide temperature range LCD's are dirt cheap.

Honestly the design needs to be updated for manufacture. Someone with An EE degree and eaglecad can create a new design in a month or two that could be single Pc boards.

I was at the Dayton Hamvention last weekend and picked up some 240x64 graphic LCDs for $7 ea. T6963 controllers, black on green with backlight.
I coded up a simulator to test out some ideas using Borland BCB 6. This is the result so far... (Yeah the gauges/icons suck...)



The LCD routines are based upon Michael Karas'
http://www.carousel-design.com/GraphLCD.html

Has anyone considered hooking up some AtoD converters to a laptop or car-puter and just having a LCD monitor for gauges? You could hook up a ECM scanner too and make on the fly engine tweaks.

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It's been a while....^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

quote Originally posted by Cliff Pennock: There were only eight ever made and all of them were sold here in the Netherlands. A few (3) of them had small problems but I'm convinced that had to do with the quality of the circuit boards which I had etched myself. And honestly, the seven(!) circuit boards are really a bit too complex to make yourself:

Is this one of it?

quote Originally posted by my-fiero: Is this one of it?

Well, yeah.

I have to say that Cliff’s is my favorite digital dash design—detailed but not over the top. Very sharp. I think the next best is Tom Sweet’s, which is what I ended up installing in my car. I had a little challenge with a bad ground in my car (causing the temp to read high at first), but got that sorted out and they work sweet. Here’s a video I made for Tom that shows his gauges in action.

Doc

Halleluya, somebody that kin do 'lectronics!

I've been thinking of doing some bar/dot LED displays for the fuel, oil, gas, & voltage using a simple circuit of LM3914 bar/dot display drivers. The four displays could easily be made to fit in the area where the two gauges go now. The good thing about the LM 3914 is that it will handle either a ten-bar display or a ten-position moving dot display. They can also be cascaded so that a 120-mph display would not be difficult. The bad thing is that each chip will only handle a ten-bar display or a ten-position moving dot display. That means that a 120-mph speedo with 120 discrete LEDs would require 12 chips just for the speedo. A 7000-RPM tach that reads by hundreds would take another 7, with 1 each for the fuel, oil, gas, & voltage displays. That's 23 chips and 230 discrete LEDs, and that doesn't even include the components for the dimming and illuminating circuitry.

Cliff, would you consider releasing your schematics so that we perfboard/wirewrap geeks could give it a try?

as far as digital clusters go, i really like the 93?, 94, 95, 96 vette cluster. i miss mine. and the z24's cluster is sweet looking too. i would choose the C4's over the cavi's because the lcd display is orange as with the needles. perfect for that pontiac dash lights color look. but it can be changed to some other colors using the correct films and the correct colored bulbs. say red led's

OK, It's been awhile... but back on track for my digital dash design. First a few pix.

This is my mini CNC gantry mill I built a few years ago. I'm using it to cut out the backing material for the LCDs


Doing the cutting


The results


The LCDs mounted to the back of the cluster


Designed and ordered some PCBs from ExpressPCB (Free CAD software too!)
http://www.expresspcb.com/


Populated a prototype

Would need a re-spin for mass production, a few minor problems

Front view of the cluster


Running the display test code


Lights out shot


I decided that since I have a bunch of LCDs that I would just design a controller board that could be multi-purposed.
So each LCD will have it's own controller (above) , ATMega32 running the same code.

A master controller will communicate via SPI to each of the displays and tell it what to display.
(The slave controllers know *how* to display everything (text, bitmaps gauges), the master orders what and where)

As I have a Formula, I also added another display in the Aux gauge pod.

So this is where it stands right now. I have most of the BCB prototype code ported to WinAVR and running.
I lost a few days getting bogged down with JTAG fuses being enabled, but have made decent progress so far this weekend.

I haven't yet begun work on the master controller.

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quote Originally posted by Jakezilla3: Has anyone considered hooking up some AtoD converters to a laptop or car-puter and just having a LCD monitor for gauges? You could hook up a ECM scanner too and make on the fly engine tweaks.

I seen some pics of a concept car a little while back that had an LCD screen for the dash. It looked hot.

88Formula327, is it possible to change the font for the numbers you setup? and using some white, red, amber, or amber n red LEDS to use for the backlighting would really set that thing off!

quote Originally posted by americasfuture2k: 88Formula327, is it possible to change the font for the numbers you setup? and using some white, red, amber, or amber n red LEDS to use for the backlighting would really set that thing off!

The fonts are generated from Windows TTF fonts, so the answer to the fisrt part is yes. I found this http://www.mikrocontroller....715/GLCD_Env_1.2.zip when I was looking for some routines for the LCD driver. Anyone more graphically inclined than me (which should be anyone) could mock up a display with this.

The colors are determined at the time of manufacture of the LCDs. Although the backlight could be changed, it would be easier to chose the colors you wish when purchased.

I'm using LCDs since that is what I picked up at a good price. But VFDs could also be used: http://www.noritake-elec.com/3000_series.htm and with color filters http://www.noritake-elec.com/colors.htm

neat color choices. but im sure they will look way different in person.

i just had something pop into me head after seeing those links you just posted up, have a GM logo then a PONTIAC logo then the FIERO logo followed by the pegasus as a initializing presentation. it would of course hafta be fairly quick with each logo. look pretty nifty too

quote Originally posted by AusFiero: I seen some pics of a concept car a little while back that had an LCD screen for the dash. It looked hot.

Like this? ------> https://www.fiero.nl/forum/Forum6/HTML/056777.html

quote Originally posted by americasfuture2k: neat color choices. but im sure they will look way different in person. i just had something pop into me head after seeing those links you just posted up, have a GM logo then a PONTIAC logo then the FIERO logo followed by the pegasus as a initializing presentation. it would of course hafta be fairly quick with each logo. look pretty nifty too

This is what I have right now on the init screen...

I would be more than happy to help with this!!! Is your only option to run a windows based pc? would a hp thinclient work? low power dc based and could be set up to power on when the car is powered on then with a simple script it would boot automaticly< plus no moving parts! all flash drivin.

quote Originally posted by Fieronum6: I would be more than happy to help with this!!! Is your only option to run a windows based pc? would a hp thinclient work? low power dc based and could be set up to power on when the car is powered on then with a simple script it would boot automaticly< plus no moving parts! all flash drivin.

I have liitle graphic arts skill... so any layout/design help would be appreciated. There is a link a few posts back to an LCD simulator. (mikrocontroller.net)

This design is microcontroller based, not PC based. I am using Borland C++ on a PC to develop and debug the routines. (Much faster and easier than trying to do so on an embedded system)

This is the actual controller/size for one display.

ok I get it now, what would you like on the display, it looks pretty good, i mean you are limited to pixels and there size on the display, i will try to draw somthing up. more than happy to test one out for you too!

is it possible to invert the display? only the lettering lights up green?

quote Originally posted by americasfuture2k: is it possible to invert the display? only the lettering lights up green?

Yes, the firmware is written to be able to invert the on/off state of the pixels when drawn.

I made some more progress, basically I have the display running in the Aux cluster with all of the megasquirt data.
I decided to keep that part separate from the dash cluster so that the dash would be more universal for non-MS users

I need to drop the fuel tank this weekend, so won't be doing much on the dash project.

quote Originally posted by revin: Cliff, I will personally take care of the 4yr old baby sitting for a few days in order for you to whip one of those out for me Well just the plane trip over here will put them to sleep and back and forth would take a day so the duties would only be really 1 day of six flags amusement park then back on the plane to daddy!

You just want a reason to go to Six Flags.

bump to keep alive and kicking!

A question just came to me about these. When I drive at nuight, I like my guages very dim, as I drive narrow 2 lane roads that have no street lights and the dimmed dash helps me see better. Are these able to be dimmed as the factory ones are?

i see it possible with a PWM.

Trying to keep alive. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A bump for wishfull thinking!

kinda funny, on my B-Body forum (91-96 Impala's, Caprices) Everyone wants to switch from the stock digital to analog, here everyone wants to switch from analog to digital. Infact i just converted my cluster in my 96 Caprice to analog

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Fiero- mild 2.9 160hp
Caprice- wild 383 500hp
--Adam-- ASE Certified Technician
IM AOL: FieroGT5speed

HEY CLIFF,

I know you're skeptical about posting the info to make these things, but can you at least post the image file for the warning lamp overlays? It's easy to make those with some transparency film. I'd like to make mine all red like that thing... I hate the multicolored indicators.

And I know you said earlier that for most of us, making the circuit boards would be too hard... but some guys, like me, can do that with ease. I'd love to do a project like this.

quote Originally posted by Jakezilla3: Has anyone considered hooking up some AtoD converters to a laptop or car-puter and just having a LCD monitor for gauges? You could hook up a ECM scanner too and make on the fly engine tweaks.

I've been thinking of doing this with my Fiero, as I'm using Megasquirt on my Ecotec. Megasquirt can show real time engine info, and datalog it all. I was going to mount a touchscreen over the center air vents, then dock my laptop behind the passenger seat. Granted, it can't show the speed, but all of the engine vitals are there.

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Petty Officer Michael C Casaceli
Aircraft Electronics Technician Second Class
AIMD Brunswick (2007-present)
Patrol Squadron Ten (2003-2007)
United States Navy

quote Originally posted by fieroturbo: but can you at least post the image file for the warning lamp overlays?

Sure.