Spent a bit of time today dismantling throttle bodies and cleaning up some of the errant oil from the Morgan Park mishaps. Also pulled the gearbox and stuck the twin plate clutch back in;
Oooooohhhh boy... I'm going to need a fair bit of time getting used to this thing... Its going to require a video to describe how quickly it revs now with the near non-existent flywheel... very much like a bike... and it now means very quick shifts. Good for the track... a bit laborious on the street! No more school runs!!
Been a bit quiet on the ol' forum lately... So here we go with a silly little project I've been tinkering with;
So as part of me refining the megasquirt tune every now and then, I decided it'd be a good idea to configure a coolant-based rev limit - because why not? But that then begged the question - how do I know what the rev limit is on the tacho? The old E46 BMW M3 has the answer... it has LEDs in the tacho that gradually went out as the rev limit increased when the car warmed up... which I naturally thought was cool at the time.
So thought I'd try and do something similar - and so far it might be relatively easy (famous last words). Here it is at the moment - a little series of LEDs hooked up to a Genuino UNO;
I loved the "Dick Smith Fun Way into Electronics" books/kits back in the day... And Genuino/Arduino is basically the modern day version of it. As it happens, I still have one of the old Dick Smith books and there was a kit that basically did the same thing as what I'm doing with the Genuino, but without the modern-day smarts. In the 'old days' you'd use resistors to scale the voltage that you measure via the temp sensor to switch the correct number of LEDs on and off. With the Genuino, you just do it in software code and send the program to the chip... So I've then also added a little up/down cycle of the lights when it starts up... because... why not?
Thought I might also add to it to receive a tacho signal and perhaps make the lights flash or something when approaching the limit... But I dunno how to do that yet!
So that's the easy bit. The tricky bit now is to try and make a little housing for the LEDs to sit behind the tacho gauge face in the correct semi-circular orientation... And then eventually I'll probably head over to revlimiter.net and order a custom set of gauges for the light to shine through! Figuring the best way to make a little housing might be to 3D print it........ I may have found my excuse to buy a 3D printer.
