Can I use this to make a digital gauge cluster?

I just stumbled across this product while researching ways to create my own digital gauge cluster to replace the dying cluster in my crown vic.

My current understanding is that there’s support for a “dashboard” through a web interface, but not necessarily an actual in-car dash?

I guess my question is, is it feasible to use this product for my project? Would I need the extra horsepower of the pi 3, or would the zero be enough? Also, is there a way to “sleep” the pi instead of having it do a full boot-up everytime I start the car?

Hey there. I just thought this info may be usable for you:
AutoPi goes to sleep if it doesn’t get RPM PID. It goes to hibernation if battery voltage drops too low. So in theory, it would just wake up from sleep. Not sure how long that takes though.

As for display, I’m thinking of writing a Python script that will send out data via UART (probably USB-UART) to a Nextion display for my car. The only “problem” I see right now is that AutoPi can (with its loggers) pull data on 1 second interval. For a dash that’s too slow IMHO.

Just thought I’d leave my 2 cents here if there is anything useful.

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Thanks for the info! I actually hadn’t considered the data interval, 1 second is definitely pretty slow. If I could use a gps speedo and install an analog tachometer (which would be kinda cool anyways) that might still be usable. But at that rate, the autopi wouldn’t be doing much for me anyways (as my gas gauge and some lights are analog.)

If there isn’t a way to speed up that interval, then it seems like autopi isn’t a great solution for me…

I hope someone from the AutoPi team answers this :slight_smile:
It does seem like a cool project, maybe it’s possible to get readings faster.

Considering all of it seems python based, and not terribly efficient in terms of CPU use, i doubt it’d work very well for a real time dashboard as is, even with the reduced interval (through the loggers and the whole stack). It wasn’t really meant for it either (it’s meant for fleet management and logging, mostly).

The basis is there, however - the hardware, the peripherals, the drivers - so you might be able to hack something together regardless. And i might be completely wrong, and it might actually work just fine if there’s a way to make the interval shorter, and kill all logging.

Hi @Nejc_Koncan

So, it is actually already possible to go below 1 sec, for the loggers. Its all hidden below under the advanced settings.

Basically the “Loggers” section is a simplication on top of other features, making it more user friendly. Let me give you an example.

These are the loggers setup for one car:

loggers

As you can see there are loggers in 3 intervals (1, 5 and 30 sec). From the loggers menu its not possible to set the interval below 1 sec.

But what actually happens when you create a logger, is that it creates a workflow below. If you click advanced->processes->obd_manager, then you will see all the different workflows created for the obd_manager. You will see that they (to some extend), match the intervals created in the Loggers menu:

obd_manager_workers

If you click on one (in this case we click on the 30sec readout), you will see that all your loggers setup for logging every 30sec is shown under the workflow:

worker_workflow

So basically the workers is a “receipe/workflow” for the tasks that needs to be carried out every 30 sec. And a worker can be set to an interval below 1sec (you need to go custom to do it, so be carefull as reverting will overwrite your old loggers). A workflow can also contain very advanced commands, where commands a dependant on the order or a number of commands in succession to each other.

But the possiblity is there, its just a little more advanced :slight_smile:

best
Peter

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Dear Peter,

I followed your approach(had same issue here), synced to the device, rebooted etc. but it just doesn’t seem to work. I’m am sending the jsons to my own server, and from the timestamps in the json objects I can see that the frequency is too low. I put the readout to 0.5sec so this should not be too high I guess. Any suggestions?

image

Hi

The data may be logged using a fast interval, which it should in your case. But when viewing the data, the dashboard will aggregate the data, based on the date range, and size of the chart, to prevent sending unnecessary data. The raw data can either be retrieved via our API, or if you change the cloud api url to use your own url, the device can send the data directly to your own server.

Best regards
/Malte