I'm getting my 15 yo a kit for Christmas. I also picked up one for myself so I could get a head start on the inevitable questions.
Any of you ladies and gents build with them?
What are some of the projects you have built that you enjoyed?
I managed to make a RGB LED do it's thing tonight. The coding is a little tedious and a bit of a mystery at the moment. The kit I ordered made it as clear as mud.
A friend and I built a mini "dash" display panel driven by an Arduino. Basically the megasquirt broadcasts data over CAN bus, the Arduino has a CAN shield to receive it, then it crunches the data through some processing and generates control sequences to send to a Nextion LCD that's mounted in a laser-cut panel where the factory tape deck used to be.
It's cool, although not as useful as I'd hoped because it's too hard to read while driving. Font too small and it's a relatively low-end display that doesn't do well in direct sunlight. It is a simple touchscreen though, so it's got multiple display screens you can scroll through.
Brief demo:
In reply to codrus :
That's pretty cool. I'm a long way from building anything like that.
In reply to Toyman01 :
Your desk looks a little like my desk. 
I used one to build a Subaru obd1 data logger. It reads the non standard baud rate on the ECU, takes an analog input from a wideband O2, displays some data and writes to an SD card log file. It's the old way of doing things burn eeproms, log, change, burn eeproms. Just plugged it in after years on the shelf, still works.
Planning on using one for a CAN to GM Class 2 Serial adapter to interface between an SARVC Alternator control unit and a Ford ECU on my locost. Although I haven't gotten past the concept.
I built a water pump controller for my greenhouse. Given how cheap the controller is, it's more fun than getting some "programmable" relays for what I'm doing. In theory, I was also going to add more features, as there are quite a few people using them for hydroponics controllers.
Given I'm not a programmer, the issues I had with using other people's programs stopped me. But, IMHO, that's a personal issue for me instead of a fault of the controller.
Given the cost of kits, I think it's a great idea to get one for your kids. They may find some new passion out of it. And if they don't, no big deal.
In reply to codrus :
Having done something similar for years, recording is a far better thing to do than having a display. Regardless of how well they show you the information, they are distracting, and many times you "need" to look at data, it's also the time you really need to pay attention to driving.
So my suggestion to anyone who wants something like this (which is super cool, BTW), find ways to transfer the information fast and easy to whatever tool you use to look at the data.
I was amazed at how cheap the controllers are. Amazon sells a Uno clone for about $8. The Nano boards are under $4 each. At that price, I can afford to buy a new one for every project rather than robbing the first one for parts.
I just bought a starter kit today when I was at Microcenter. Who knows if I’ll have time to mess with it but you made me want to check it out.
This is looking pretty appealing to me as a future project.
alfadriver said:In reply to codrus :
Having done something similar for years, recording is a far better thing to do than having a display. Regardless of how well they show you the information, they are distracting, and many times you "need" to look at data, it's also the time you really need to pay attention to driving.
So my suggestion to anyone who wants something like this (which is super cool, BTW), find ways to transfer the information fast and easy to whatever tool you use to look at the data.
Oh, absolutely. I have a datalogger in the car as well, it's an old DL1 from before datalogging dash displays were a thing. My friend and I built this display primarily to be a fun and cool project, rather than as a practical track application.
It did turn out to be useful to have the Arduino on the CAN bus, though. I found all kinds of stuff to do with it -- replacing the non-functional RTC in the megasquirt (MS supports a CAN RTC, so I made the Arduino emulate one), acting as a set of remote CAN analog-to-digital converters for other sensors that I added, and converting data between different CAN bus formats for different devices.
I'm a software engineer and have been doing embedded systems professionally for 25 years now, so programming the Arduino in C is pretty straightforward.
Toyman01 said:This is looking pretty appealing to me as a future project.
I've been eyeballing the kit to swap mine over to arduino with wifi powered since last winter. i'm thinking about pulling the trigger on it after the first of the year to give me another project and make the printer more useful.
I’m interested in this! https://speedyefi.com/?product=miata-89-93-na6-full-plug-and-play-kit
uses a ‘speeduino’, and you use tuner studio to tune it
Still tinkering with this. Today was figuring out the LCD display. I'd like to build a digital clock and needed to figure out how to get the display to work.
Looks better in video.
In reply to Toyman01 :
I wouldn't take that to high school even if you are Anglo-Saxon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident
John Welsh said:In reply to Toyman01 :
I wouldn't take that to high school even if you are Anglo-Saxon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident
Just use these batteries for full effect.
You'll need to log in to post.
