[Ah2002] didn’t like the shaky needle in his car’s speedometer so he replaced it with a ring of LEDs. The old speedometer had a cable which rotated along with the gearbox for mechanical speed measurement. By connecting the stepper motor from a printer instead of this cable, a voltage is generated that fluctuates with the speed of the car. The fluctuation is linear so a given voltage measurement can be directly associated with one particular speed. By using a trimpot to calibrate the input voltage, [Ah2002] connected the signal to an LM3914 dot/bar display driver. These can be chained together, lighting a string of outputs based on the single voltage input. The result is the board seen above, which was covered with a printed paper graph in the final assembly.
Judging from the video after the break, we’d bet there was some distracted driving during the calibration process. The driver appears to be holding the video recorder, and since a cellphone GPS was used during calibration we wonder if [Ah2002] was adjusting the trimpot, looking at the GPS, and driving all at once. It’s a fairly awesome hack, but do be careful when you’re working on something like this.
