Been a pretty good Christmas here too. Had family and friends over yesterday (and their dog, so ours has been knackered today having spent the whole of yesterday playing) and just had a nice relaxed day.
I've been poking around a bit with a silly project for the new year that I've been meaning to get to for years (literally).
Upon finding an early Toyota Supra in our local scrap yard, and it having been there for a couple of weeks and having virtually every item removed *but* the digital dash, I decided it needed to be grabbed as it was simply too cool to let go to waste...especially for the fiver it cost me. That was about fifteen years ago, and it's been rattling around in the "do something with one day" box ever since.
Found it again the other day and have started poking around with it.
Plan is to take this (anyone remember them?)...
...and turn it into a status readout panel for my PC. Speedo will be CPU load, rev counter probably a graphical representation of the same, fuel gauge for RAM load, and temperature gauge to show the CPU temperature. Clock will be used as well...a clock, and I'll find something to do with the warning lights.
Current planned approach is to have my PC simply spit out the relevant data from the serial port a few times a second, then have probably an Arduino to actually drive the dash. It appears to do all the signal processing and display driving on board (simply plugging in where the standard analogue one would), so I'm hoping that it will be a pretty simple matter of wiggling some voltages around on some pins and in the case of the speedo just spoofing the hall effect sensor.
That's the *theory* anyway, though I still need to work out how to power the thing. Annoyingly absolutely nothing in terms of connectors seem to be labelled in there and I've not been able to find any useful data on the internet, so reverse engineering looks to be the order of the day.
Reverse engineering might take a while given the sheer density with which things are packed in though. I'm hoping that once I get the main board out that it will be pretty apparent where power is coming from so I can figure it out.
Every module there seems to use a minimum of two board construction, and sod all is labelled. Thankfully it's all through hole construction so no surface mount nonsense to worry about.
Utterly pointless, but should be a fun little side project. It's been forever since I actually made something just for the sake of it.
