I wanted to share something I've done in last few weeks. I once made board with few leds and connected it straight to parallel port. Dirty and not really expandable. Now I did it better using microcontroller (Teensy++), USB-UART adapter (for data transmit), few leds and LCD. Previously with parallel port I used T-RonX's VB.NET library which is very nice to use. Unfortunately it's now out of date, but with a help of DarkTimes I made C# OutGauge program which sends the data to microcontroller. My part of the code is certainly not too pretty and effective but it does the job.
I have some experience in AVR programming so microcontroller part wasn't problem for me. It's not too fine code either as I've been modifying it multiple times and been too lazy to make it clean but nevertheless it works. It receives the 31 byte line from UART 20 times (50 ms) a second. There is now four leds: red, green, yellow and blue, so all lights in LFS virtual dashboard can be shown. Currently all same color (eg. oil warning, battery, shift light in red) shares the same led, but it's easily expandable. Unfortunately leds show bad in pictures (sorry for my not-too-good camera), but there they still are.
The LCD is from eBay and came from Hong Kong. It only costed like ~2,5€ including P&P so it was truly a bargain. It uses HD44780 controller as was my old one-line LCD so it was easy upgrade. LCD is tad slow, but I can't complain for this price. Currently it shows (up from left to right) RPM, fuel and speed, lower line is OutGauge's "Display2" which shows information about brake balance, some wing data or "Pit Instructions" if playing with pit settings. The gear indicator is from old school project and is fairly simple but is pretty cool.
I'm including the codes, both computer and AVR side here. They are still WIP and as of is unusable for anything else than JUST this hardware but you never know if someone makes something out of it. There is small part of tachometer in AVR code too, but I abandoned my old slow tacho for now. I used it in past with parallel port and extremely dirty DAC (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6er0Oc3niEc) and it works now somehow too but it would need small driving circuit which I haven't done (yet?). Been busy and more intersted in LCD.
I probably missed tons of things I wanted to say, so I'll update this thread when it comes to my mind.
Bigger picture
WIP codes
I have some experience in AVR programming so microcontroller part wasn't problem for me. It's not too fine code either as I've been modifying it multiple times and been too lazy to make it clean but nevertheless it works. It receives the 31 byte line from UART 20 times (50 ms) a second. There is now four leds: red, green, yellow and blue, so all lights in LFS virtual dashboard can be shown. Currently all same color (eg. oil warning, battery, shift light in red) shares the same led, but it's easily expandable. Unfortunately leds show bad in pictures (sorry for my not-too-good camera), but there they still are.
The LCD is from eBay and came from Hong Kong. It only costed like ~2,5€ including P&P so it was truly a bargain. It uses HD44780 controller as was my old one-line LCD so it was easy upgrade. LCD is tad slow, but I can't complain for this price. Currently it shows (up from left to right) RPM, fuel and speed, lower line is OutGauge's "Display2" which shows information about brake balance, some wing data or "Pit Instructions" if playing with pit settings. The gear indicator is from old school project and is fairly simple but is pretty cool.
I'm including the codes, both computer and AVR side here. They are still WIP and as of is unusable for anything else than JUST this hardware but you never know if someone makes something out of it. There is small part of tachometer in AVR code too, but I abandoned my old slow tacho for now. I used it in past with parallel port and extremely dirty DAC (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6er0Oc3niEc) and it works now somehow too but it would need small driving circuit which I haven't done (yet?). Been busy and more intersted in LCD.
I probably missed tons of things I wanted to say, so I'll update this thread when it comes to my mind.
Bigger picture
WIP codes