Manual Transmission Gear sensor

May 9, 2010 by Mike Szczys 57 Comments

[Ben] bought a remote starter for his car but needed a way to make sure the manual transmission was in neutral when starting. He built this infrared sensor frame to detect the position of the stick. It uses four beam paths which will tell him the exact gear or neutral position of the shifter. For this project he just needs to detect neutral but exact gearing is apparently necessary information for his next hacking project. We initially were worried about sunlight interfering with the sensor readings but he’s building this to go under the collar that is used to cover up the mechanical joint at the base of the stick.

Vehicle Information Display Hacks

May 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

We’ve had a few folks send us info about their vehicle display hacks after seeing [Will O’Brien’s] motorcycle computer a few days ago.

On the left we have a display for an electric vehicle. [S1axter] is using a 4.3″ TFT screen to display charge information for each battery cell in the car. An ATmega88 collects the data and sends it to a breakout board with an LCD controller on it.

To the right is a display from a Formula Student project. a Matrix Orbital GLK19264-7T-1U LCD display provides a lot of real estate for displaying data. Right now [Alan] is still in the early prototyping stages, but the video after the break demonstrates the RPM readout using a function generator. It’s not shown in the video, but he tells us that he’s since tried it out with the engine and has a PIC 16f877 reading temperate data from the electronic control transmission sensors in addition to the RPM data.

Correction: Thanks to [j] for correcting our mistake. This is a Formula Student car.

Continue reading “Vehicle Information Display Hacks” →

Motorcycle computer

May 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

Hackaday writer of yore [Will O’Brien] has been working on this hardware for his motorcycle. Speed, voltage, gear, and temperature data is displayed on a 16×2 character LCD. The speed is pulled from the bike itself and the gear is calculated by comparing engine RPM to wheel RPM. He’s using the popular DS1820 1-wire temp sensor along with an Arduino to pull everything together. At this point he estimates there’s about $50 worth of parts, but that can be reduced by etching a board and just using the necessary components.

Forget The Rovio, Drive A Taxi With Your Mind.

April 29, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

While browsing through flicker this morning, we spotted this interesting image. Two radio controlled cars hooked to Arduinos. What was going on? What is [knolleary] doing with them? We couldn’t find any information so we clicked through to his personal site. What we found was a quite interesting story about how he set up a race between two taxi cabs being controlled by the Emotiv headsets for the BBC. Yeah, forget driving a Rovio around with your mind. We’re still a bit curious about the two bumper cars in the picture. We can see that his tests were done on a blue radio controlled mini, so what are the bumper cars for? Did any of you catch this on the air? How well did the taxis drive? Was he using the facial expressions or the concentration?

Driving The Car Without Going Anywhere

April 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAZSPK4pWc]

This video game controller is a factory fresh VW. Much like the racing simulator from earlier in the week, the video game data is being displayed on the instrument panel. This takes us to a much higher level now because control for the game is taken from the car’s CANbus using and ODB-II connector. If you don’t speak in automotive jargon, that means that the sensor readings from the steering wheel, shifter, and pedals are being picked up and exported as joystick commands to the PC running the driving game. The only place the experience uses a substitute for the real thing is the sound, which is being played through speakers instead of emanating from under the hood. Looks like you just need to add a projector and screen to your garage in order to turn it into the hottest new gaming device.

GPS Embedded In Visor

April 20, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 38 Comments

We’re all for putting a GPS where it doesn’t normally go, but we’re not sure [Roberto’s] version* is the best of locations. Take for example [Jair2k4’s] GPS. It doesn’t block out 50% of his vision of the road and the impending accident in front of him.

Regardless, the solid aluminum and seamless mounting really does make it look like part of the car, and props to him for making it ‘hidden’ when he’s out of the car to try and prevent thieves. But there are cheaper, easier, and dare we say better solutions out there.

*We found his site only works in Internet Explorer, gah!

Hijacking The Mazda LCD Display

April 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 75 Comments

[Pieter] is in the process of adding a turbo package to his ride. He needed a status display for the boost but didn’t have a good way to mount an additional display. He came up with the idea of using the LCD screen that’s already in the dashboard, but the specs for it were not available. Wielding his hard-earned hacking skills [Pieter] used a logic analyzer to sniff out the communications to the screen. He built a controller board that overrides the data coming in from the head unit. The board is also able to query the car’s computer for data and display it in any format you want. What he ends up with is a stock look that he can customize for his needs. Nice!