Well, the TFT LCD instrument panel panel I had originally built - as shown below - turned out to be rubbish. It didn't even last a day! It was just too dim & too small. So, I immediately went back to the drawing board. Decided that all the information from the ECU that I thought I needed on display, such as temperature compensation, manifold pressure, etc, wasn't really of any use in normal driving. So decided on a simplified design with only essential information - RPM, Fuel Level, Engine Temp., Battery Voltage, Air-Fuel Ratio, and of course Speed. Already had a mechanical tacho and speedometer, so needed a new design for the other information. Came up with a mechanical quad arrangement made from 3-D printed parts with each pointer driven by an SG-90 RC micro servo controlled from an NUCLEO-F303K8 microcontroller. Along with the tacho and speedo, it was mounted on a wooden panel painted satin black:
The instrument controller transmits a subset of the ECU's internal parameters via an HC-06 Bluetooth device. I've developed a simple Android app that allows a quick check of ECU parameters and the state of tune across the VE Map. It also records ECU data for off-line analysis. This is a handy way to check if everything is working OK in lieu of detailed information displayed on the dash.
Discarded TFT LCD-based Instrument Panel
One of the OLED displays on the Mini's instrument panel failed so decided to replace the the two small OLEDs with a single larger colour display. Also deleted the mechanical tachometer.
The display is a 3.5" 480 x 320 TFT LCD by "mcufriend". With 153,600 16 bit pixels, it was obvious that my trusted Arduino 2560 didn't have the processing power to manipulate such a large quantity of data at an adequate update rate. I'd long wanted to try the ARM Cortex CPU's so this was the opportunity. Found that the NUCLEO boards seemed to fit the bill so bought an stm32 NUCLEO-F303K8. Also downloaded and installed the CubeMX IDE from ST microlectronics. The NUCLEO boards and CubeMX work together seamlessly and provide a superb development environment with a decent debugger, similar to that you'd expect in industry. CubeMX / stm32 are a clear step up from Arduino in performance and capability, albeit with a much steeper learning curve.
Although the NUCLEO-F303K8 was around 2x faster than the Arduino 2560, it still didn't have adequate power to drive the LCD with anything like the speed and update rate I required. Eventually settled for the NUCLEO-F411RE that proved more than adequate for the task.
The new panel was made from a piece of scrap laminate flooring with 3D printed parts for the LCD bezel, switch bezels and various other components. There's an ON/OFF switch on the left and the switch on the right is for selecting the required display format. Still has the GPS speedo and discrete warning lamps.
On the software side, decided I needed to develop own drivers & libraries as there didn't seem to be much available in the public domain that would suit my needs. The main format has horizontal linear scales for fuel level, engine temperature, battery, and air-fuel ratio. The numerics along the bottom are air temperature, manifold absolute pressure and sync errors. The outer dial on the right is RPM and the inner dial is throttle. All of the static elements are defined in a bitmap which is drawn once on initialisation. Its takes around 200ms to draw a 480 x 320 bitmap and the screen is updated in less than 50ms, so a refresh rate of 20Hz is possible.
The main difficulty in the software was in developing a radial pointer without the ragged edges you get without using computing-intensive anti-aliasing functions. All of the pointers in the above format use small bitmaps. In the case of the horizontal scales, there's no problem with aliasing as the orientation of the symbols doesn't change - so they appear as they would in Photoshop. Once you try to rotate the bitmaps, or draw straight lines, they can become very ugly at certain angles. After experimenting with various anti-aliasing methods, eventually settled on an averaging filter which was a good compromise between aesthetics and CPU time.
A 2nd format provides all the sensor data and other ECU parameters needed for diagnostics:
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