Tag Archives: digital dashboard

Digital Dashboard – Shield is up!

Leave a reply

A few weeks ago my PCBs for the “Main Unit Shield” came in. Again, OSH Park delivered ahead of schedule and they look great.

shieldpcb

 

Seeing that i’m doing more and more builds with small surface mount parts, I decided to get a hot-air rework station. It turns out that Microcenter down the street carries a cheap unit so i picked one up and got to work. It was actually pretty easy to use. I slobbed solder paste over the pads, placed the part, and applied the heat. After about a minute the tiny solder balls in the paste would start to melt and cling together. The solder mask did its job, all the molten solder blobs found their homes on pads, the part self centered, and voila. It turned out great and was far more forgiving than I would have thought. (or so I thought).

This board was a bit more of a headache than the last board. When i first powered on the board, the ADCs were all over the place. I couldn’t get accurate readings, they should shift and wonder, it was a mess. The only good news was that the I2C pullups and connection out to the dashboard worked fine.

The ADC trouble boiled down to three issues. First, I specified the wrong opamp parts. I designed the ADC input opamp buffers as requiring rail-to-rail input (common mode voltage) and the parts I specified didn’t allow this. I replaced the Microchip MCP604s with TI OPA4342s.

Second, I found a short between two input channels which occurred because i had a via too close to a resistor pad. I removed the solder bridge and filed it away as a lesson learned for the next PCB i layout.

Even after doing the above two fixed, i was getting strange results. I think having the short killed an opamp, so i replaced it. Then that seemed to work, but then the ADC wasn’t reading correctly. I wasn’t sure if it was hardware or software at this point so i broke out the Saleae Logic Analyzer and verified the SPI bus communication. It all looked good. So I ordered more parts, replaced more parts. Still no luck.

Finally I realized that I might be cooking these parts with the heat gun. I had a couple spare parts so I decided to remove the bad parts with hot air, but solder the new ones in with the iron… and it worked. So I spun my wheels for a couple weeks mostly due to my own workmanship mistakes. Looking back on it, i think that rather than blasting the part with heat, i need to more closely mimic the temperature profile of a reflow oven. Ie, warm the board/part up for a few minutes first at a safe temperature, and then relatively quickly ramp up the heat to melt the solder and then drop it back down again.

But in the end, the board works.

shield

At this point this prototype hardware is pretty solid. I’ll continue to fine tune the software, but I’m mostly waiting for the M3 to thaw out so I can install the sensors and this unit in the car and do some field testing.

Digital Dashboard – Display Ideas

Leave a reply

The dashboard/logger is starting to come together. Most of the sensor functionality I want is in place, it logs well, etc. The tricky part now is how to display all this info in a way that is useful and clear while driving the car.

One of the most import visual outputs is the shift light itself. The setup i’m using is fairly large and clear with enough length and resolution to hopefully make it clear where you are in the rev band and how its trending. I do hope that they are bright enough to see in the sunlight, but I think having it mounted in the factory dash area under the dash hood should make this ok.

The second most important indication is for the warning messages. If my oil pressure drops or I start to overheat, i want it to be very clear very quickly. As of now, if there is an alarm condition, the whole display changes to a warning message screen:

achtung“Warning”, “Achtung!”, “Danger to the Manifold”, would all be appropriate. At the same time the shift lights will all blink red. I can display up to three alarms at once should hopefully be enough, even for a German car.

Lastly, i thought it would be cool to have a large number display for the gear indicator. While i generally know what gear I’m in, i’m moving to a 3.46 rear end in the E36 this year and will be shifting more often so it may come in handy.

IMG_1211Working with an old school character display is pretty clunky, but it at least allows you to program 8 custom characters. I used five of the custom characters for the I, II, III, IIII, and IIII characters for the bar graph. I used the remaining three slots for the large number characters- basically an upper block, lower block, and full block. There are prettier 4 line characters out there, but I don’t have the memory for them with the bar graph.

The mbed microcontroller i’m using does have a built in controller for a 7″ 800×480 full color TFT display, but that’s for another day.

In addition to the main screen, I can scroll through different screens using the buttons on the right side of the display. As of now I have a screen showing the raw ADC data for the 8 analog inputs, a screen with all processed sensors, a screen with GPS status, a screen with some basic setup stuff. I’ll post more info on those when i get them sorted out.