Original guages are back in place

Today I went with Gil, a friend of mine, to install the original guages back in the car. It took us a while to put everything back together, having the lights work and the microcontroller moving the needles. It turns out that most of the light bulbs got burned while we played with them. Also, it took us a while to figure out that our power adaptor did not have enough juice, so we hooked up a computer power supply and used the 12V to get more amperage.



We then put it back in the car...



Gil admiring his work at 2am..



(Sorry about the low quality of the pictures today, but I did not have my digital camera and had to settle for my cellphone)

-Yuval

Getting the original guages to work

After we managed to make the gauges work by "implanting" servo's in them, we decided that it's not good enough, since we would like the original car to remain unmodified as much as possible.

The guages needles move according to the frequency that they receive. Since it is impossible to generate those frequencies from Windows (or any other non real-time OS), we needed to move into hardware (yeah!).

We decided to go with Atmel AVR microcontroller chips (mainly because that's what we could easily find in Israel). We got a sample of an ATMEGA16 and wrote some C code to generate the frequencies (WinAVR and AVRlib). Since this is the first time we used this platform it took us a few hours to get it working.

Generating the frequencies is not enough -- you need the PC to ask the microcontroller to generate the right frequency according to the speed/rpm in the game. Unfortunatelly, the AVR cannot speak directly with an RS-232 interface, so we had to connect a MAX232 chip in order to get it working.

The sequence is as following: there is a process on the PC which collects the games telemtry with Nascar 2003 APIs. It then translate the speed/rpm to commands which are written to the microcontroller via a COM port. The microcontroller parses the requests and set the frequencies to the gauges accordingly.

Nice :-)

Videos available via eMule

As you've noticed many people have accessed this blog, which exceeded the limit to the server on which I publish the videos. Many people have asked to share the videos with eMule/Bittorrent. For now I've published them with eMule and will later on make them available with Bittorrent.

The ED2K link is here - feel free to share.

If you can,post these Videos where you can and write here a comment with a link to the files.

Enjoy,

-Yuval

It's Alive Videos !!!

This is the first time we actually tried to get it working



We decided to have some fun with it



We stubled into a bug in Nascar which froze the whole system for a few seconds. Funny enough it was exactly when a Viagra car passed us :-)



This is how looks inside and outside