important mileston last night - those with long memories will remember me asking about PIC prgrammers ... well finally got a USB one and programmed one to flash a LED!!

ok, not particularluy useful but next step will be to drive a stepper motor that if all goes welll and I can sin it fast en ough, will be used to drive a speedo.

need to figure out the sensor though, optical, inductive, hall effect or nasty reed switch .....

if that fails, then plan b) would be a simple 7 segment LED display for speedo and miles or a fance LCD display perhaps.

Don't know anything about electronics but I saw a site on building a rev counter a while back. Don't know if this is helpful but its here.
If you click on the Next generation Tab at the bottom of the page he has got a digital readout to work with the lights.

[Edited on 1/12/06 by Dusty]

i bought all the bits, built it (whilst off work ill - probably not the best time to do it) and haven't been able to get it to work.

although haven't really tried that hard it has to be said.

Congrats- the flashing LED is the equivalent of the "hello world" of computing!!!

I can remember my first PIC powered flashing LED! Oh the joy

I really must dig out the digidash and finish it properly....

Well done.

I would love to get into that side of the electronics but its a bit close to the day job ( computers )

I am cheating and using one of these.




Driven of my ECU

regards

Agriv8

Nice, Did you go for one of the 20 odd quid kits from Maplin or something different.

I was thinking of the same (with digital speed output) , but deciding between either multiple PICs controlling different parts of the display or extra support chips to light up all the LEDs & handle the inputs.

I guess your next bit is to get an interrupt pin working and a timer so that you can get time per "pip". I'd go for a digital display to start off with myself as its a much cheaper start option.

Where do you guys get your senders from?

For example, I could buy any old oil pressure sender and hook it up to my engine but how would I know what resistance across the senders terminals equates to what oil pressure?

I've tried searching on the net and while I can find loads of senders I can't find anything that tell me the relationship between the pressure and resistance across the pins.

Thanks,

Mark

Im slowly (slowly being the word) am designing and building a dash around this screen but I wasnt to keep a dial for RPM.
http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1855.pdf

Catpuss, I can throughly recommend this IC: MAX6955. Handles a keypad and loads of LED's or seven segment displays and reduces the size of the PIC (or other MCU you need) becuase it uses I2C (two wire serial bus).

Dern, shouldnt that relasionship be in the datasheet (if you can find it)?