Not sure if I posted but the dinosaur shift light was finished ages ago.
First gear display built and tested.
It turned out very well, even has M3 mounts attached to the pcb itself.
Display works but is a bit dim. Found a different display that maybe brighter and ordered a few to test.
Thought everything is slow to arrive since the cost of jet fuel has gone up so much.
Can bus isn’t tested but that normally just works. The test board has a newer chip than required but the optional resistor pads allow for most options.
Made a few small improvements to the design to allow a button to be optional. The can bus pins have also been swapped to reduce glitches. The glitches are for initial programming and not normal operation.
Have started another few devices while parts take time to ship.
Mainly around cheap alternatives to digital dashes and integration to OEM screens. So link, haltech etc can make use of OEM displays.
So much time is taken up researching and finding parts to make everything compatible. Designing a prototype board ready to manufacture takes 30-40 hours. All the research before take 5-10 times longer, after you find the documentation. Turns out there are also a bunch of mixing of analogue and digital communication between displays. Things like hdmi etc require licence fees and auto makers don’t want to pay those.
There is an extra time sink in making every component easy to repair and all PCBs have text on them covering what specs parts can be. It’s creates less reliance on schematics and hard to decipher product codes on chips. All the parts are spaced as far as allowable so hand soldering for repair is easy. There are some limits for power supply and noise / interference. So far I can hand solder everything and I’m not very good.
In some cases parts are on the underside of a board as that is easier to get to when in a case.
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Gripless ·
