Today I mostly .....

[Tom.]

Michael Knight

[Zelandeth]

The rev counter shape and speedo position relative to it do seem suspiciously reminiscent of the dash in KITT don't they!

Yes, fine, I'm a child of the 80s...Knight Rider was actually one of relatively few shows that would hold my attention for more than five minutes. I was never much interested in the TV!

[GvidoR]

I recently acquired a new daily driver to replace the Fiat Punto.





The Punto has rust on door sills, floor panels and boot floor. On top of that it needs a few other small jobs for the MOT. Repairing it wouldn't really be worth it. The Escort feels a lot more solid. Selling the Punto seems to be mission impossible, even at 100 GBP.

[Zelandeth]

That generation of Escort was a step up from the previous generation, though still not a car I had any real fondness of, just seemed very faceless. Never really had any huge headaches with them at the garage though and they always sold quickly enough!

Not really been up to a huge amount lately other than trying to recover energy from the last few weeks!

Found some time this evening though to do some further investigating of my digital Toyota dash to PC status display project.

This thing is officially the most downright *annoying* bit of electronic hardware I have ever had to work on.

It's not massively complex...We've got some power supplies, some display drivers and obviously some very basic A-D conversion going on. However this is early 80s tech so it's all through-hole boards without any surface mount stuff in sight. This is both good and bad...it makes it easier to actually see what's going on, but at the same time also means that it's terribly tightly packed. The speedometer unit (which is where the main power supply lives) is no less than four PCBs deep, in about an inch and a half.

Given that the PCB layout has in many cases been dictated by the available space, it means that the design is...well...odd. Usually finding a ground plane is easy enough, but even that's scattered all over the board on these things. The component density and being a double sided board that you can't easily turn over because of the number of things hanging off it just makes tracing traces a royal pain in the tail. Eventually though I managed to find what I was reasonably confident was a ground though, power took a bit longer. Given that this thing uses VFD displays there are a load of supply rails, 1,5V ish for the heaters, 50V or so HT for the anode voltage, and whatever the actual logic elements run on, guessing probably +/- 5V or so given that its mostly TTL stuff. So the power supply board is quite packed...and the reason I couldn't find the blasted 12V in line for so long turned out to be because you can't see it because it's almost entirely buried under components...But eventually I had found what I was sure was the right one, so tracing that out to the pin on the connector was then a trivial matter of using the meter to check which one had continuity.

The really annoying thing is that these boards all have silk screen on them - including markers for wire colours, component IDs and such, would it *really* have been too much trouble to stick a couple of extra labels for GND, +12V and such like?!? Would have taken me five minutes to get this thing up and running then...

At that point I figured I was at the point where I really hadn't got many options left save for sticking some power into it and seeing what happened. It would A: Do nothing. B: Go "pop" and let the magic smoke out, or C: Work.

So PSU set to 12V, aaaaand connected it up...and this happened.



All three modules happily waking up after a slumber of 15 odd years plus however long the car had sat in the scrap yard before I bagged the dash.

It was a relatively simple matter then to reassemble the whole lot (without getting zapped by any of the caps in the PSU board, which I can confirm do *not* have bleeder resistors on and will probably still happily bite you after a few minutes) without breaking anything.



Which I managed.

Just need to work out how to actually drive it now...Speedo is trivial as it's just got a little inductive pickup like a glorified bike computer, so that's dead easy. Fuel, temp and rev counters however I need to figure out though. Imagine fuel and temp are just expecting to see a varying resistance on the relevant pins (though of course I have to figure out *which* pins...), rev counter I reckon may be more of a headache...it's got its own separate four pin connector which appear to have some form of data on them - I have a horrible feeling that it may be looking to communicate directly with the engine ECU...If that's the case it'll probably mean ditching the original circuit for that entirely and sticking a generic display driver on (it's just a glorified LED bar graph after all).

Goodness that turned into a bit of a ramble...

[excossack]

...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..

Speedo = cpu load
Tacho = fan speed
Fuel = RAM loading
Temp = CPU temp
Clock = clock
Warning lights = OS update time?
Trip Meter = hours in use?
Odo meter = total hours

Have fun.

[Zelandeth]

Hmm...not a bad idea on the fan speed readout, though not sure it would vary enough to really give any visual effect. The only time the CPU fan really comes off idle is when doing video encoding and given it's water cooled it tends to be a very slow ramp up/down.

The trip/odometers are mechanical so probably will leave them alone as there's great potential for them making noise in operation. Not totally discounting that idea though mind you...

[GvidoR]

Nice cluster Zelandeth, reminds me of the Digifiz by VW.

Btw, Escort is nice, I got one 1300 L MK2 -75... Arizona Gold

Nice. Any pics?

In other news, managed to sell the Punto last night for €150 / £110. Which is quite good considering it now has no MOT and the airbag light is on + I kept the head unit it came with. I bought it MOT'd for €250 / £184.

[Zelandeth]

Nice cluster Zelandeth, reminds me of the Digifiz by VW.

Interesting, not seen that one before. LCD based rather than VFD which Toyota stuck with for many years (think the Yaris was still using a VFD display in 2005 or thereabouts!).

Seems to be much better documented than this Toyota unit though, pin out diagrams took seconds to find for the VW one, not so the Toyota one...

[Zelandeth]

Today I mostly...

Discovered that when I dragged my Sinclair C5 back into the land of the living, that one thing I didn't do was waterproof the control box. This resulted in it going haywire while I was out on it today after getting half drowned yesterday (it seriously looks like I've been rallying the poor thing).

Took it off, brought it in and left on top of a radiator all day (with the can off the relay) and normality has been restored. Have properly waterproofed the box this time so I don't have a replay in future. A 250W motor really doesn't seem that powerful...but when you're going downhill and it decides not to switch off it seems like a heck of a lot more!

To be honest, given the amount of miles I've done on it over the last year and their reputation for being put together more poorly than an 80s British Leyland motor, I'm really surprised to report that this is the first failure/problem I've had save for one puncture! Hope to get the brake upgrade done before the summer though when the cycleways start to get busier.

[GvidoR]

I have made some progress on the Escort. "New" 15" Mondeo Si wheels, fixed fog lights, removed wind deflectors and did a few little other bits.



Including this adapter which draws power from the fusebox and then converts it to 5V and gives me two USB ports. Currently using one for a dash cam.

[timmers522]

Yesterday I mostly...

Decided what to do with my Polo derby. Ordered a Lada 2106 grille, hope to be able to make it fit
Also, ordered a lot of paint. decided this will be my new paintjob:


Not sure if i keep it "clean" like this or give it an old look with faded paint etc.

Is there someone who can tell me some more about these Russian police?

[Tom.]

The colour of the car is standard Soviet police. The writing on the door says Militzia. Can't make the coat of arms out on the door which could be Soviet union or one of the Soviet republics.

[GvidoR]

The writing on the door says Militzia.

Milicija (or милиция with Russian letters).

[timmers522]

The colour of the car is standard Soviet police. The writing on the door says Militzia. Can't make the coat of arms out on the door which could be Soviet union or one of the Soviet republics.

The writing on the door says Militzia.

Milicija (or милиция with Russian letters).

Thanks guys! For translating russian i have my girlfriend, who speaks a bit of russian. I know on the back it says "гаи", wich translates as "gai". Believe this was some kind of traffic police?

[Tom.]

gai is for road ( traffic) police. Now changed to gibdd.