Recently, I rented a new car, and was really impressed with the instrument panel on it. It was a fairly large LCD with a mechanical speedometer and tachometer flanking it, and linked to the center stack’s display for some functions. Since then I have been toying with the idea of building one for my personal vehicle (a 98 Mustang GT I inherited from my father).
I was able to trace down the electrical signals, and I have most of the parts that would be required to build a system like this. For this, I did mock up a Javascript driven display that could serve as the basis for this system.
The page uses a set of sliders to control input values, which are mapped to the ranges I expect to see from the vehicle’s sensors (either frequency or DC volts), then calculates what should be shown on screen, and displays it. The gauges also change color when it makes sense (high or low temp and battery, low fuel, high RPM). The bulk of the styling is done in fairly simple CSS, while the bar changes (size and color) are done via Javascript.
The actual code to read the sensors is not implemented here, because I haven’t settled on how I want to physically implement this overall.
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