NefMoto

Hi Guys; after your thoughts. Many moons ago I designed a little module which plugged into the ALDL port of my old car. I would connect to the ECU; read some diagnostic into and display it on a VF display. This was well before OBD arrived.

Having recently looked at car electronics again and relighted my interest I am thinking of designing a small unit which does something similar with ME7.x. However instead of a separate display use the cars instrument cluster display and a switch to scroll through readouts.

The BMW ME7 diagnostic stream has lots of parameters which are not accessible via OBD2 protocol as I am sure the VAG implementation has.
The BMW clusters on the older cars which use ME7 have a display area which is accessible via a bus called the i-bus.

The unit will be a simple microprocessor; two k-line type bus interfaces; two hardware UARTS; small enough to fit into an OBDII plug housing; low power with auto shut off. I would open source the project; code would be in C.

You guys can hopefully tell me a) if it’s been done b) would there be demand for it apart from me c) do the VAG cars give access to displaying text / graphics on their cluster?

http://www.getste.com/store

And I'd contribute anyway I could. Great idea, assuming it came in at a price significantly under the PPD unit.

That's pretty much the idea but it looks like they interface to the cluster direct. The BMW system allows you to display that text via the OBDII port. Is that possible with VAG?

Like a scangauge?

http://www.scangauge.com/

That's what I had before; this time I want to display the data on the cluster. I also want to display some of the more interesting parameters not avaible via OBDII.

So you want to gather the data via OBD, translate it, and output it to the cluste? I think in doing that you'd be limited to the OBD specific PIDS, but I'm not sure to be honest.

Spot on. With the BMW system you can access hundreds of parameters using their proprietary protocol (may or may not be the same as the VAG system). You can also stick text and the odd character up on the cluster display. You can make a bar graph for instance.
I was thinking the hardware might be the same on a VAG vehicle; hence might as well make sure it's compatible with another manufacturer. Would just need someone to write the code!

Don't mess with my emotions here. This has been brought up many times, and the result is always the same :(

Let me know what help I can be.

I m in  I can get clusters and whatever parts that would be needed

I would be interested as well.

I have an embedded systems background (mostly linux and c) so obviously open sourcing it would make me happy :)

Thank me later.

http://www.zzottel.de/

Really nice product. Is there some sort of customization possible? for example, compensating for the 5120 hack :)

Compensation of the 5120 hack doesn't sound too difficult. I just have to double the MAP reading, right? Or does this affect also other pressure values? I could add an option for this in the settings menu of the FIS-Control in no time.