Was looking through another forum when I remembered this dash, and thought it was cool as fuck so thought id forward it on..............
AFter waiting for 6 months for a specific aftermarket dash for my race car to materialise (still hasn't!) I got on and built my own. Took me less than 10 weeks from start to finish, including installing the hardware, custom fabrication and all the custom software.
Hardware is a VIA MII-12000, running Win2K (hoping to use XPe or WinAutomotive soon) and my own custom written software front end. Data comes from the ECU (non Ford) and a standalone data logger to allow graphic representation of over 100 different channels. Dash buttons allow swapping between different road (two shown below), race, diagnostic and configuration screens.
Dash housing is a 7" TFT mounted in carbon fibre panel behind standard clear reflector to minimise light reflection. The stadnard warning idnicators were chopped up and moved around. Connections to standard loom were kept which allows me to swap back to standard cluster in under five minutes if I need to).
I'm still working on the race screens at the moment and have incorporated such features as displaying a gauage to indicate amount of time you are up or down on best lap at any point on the circuit and also an automatic stopwatch for timing the runs.
Been using it for around 10 hours now and been 100% reliable, though I have built in several "watchdog / auto restart" features to recover if something does go pear shaped.
As its a race car, I'm not too bothered if it does crash though as I have a totally separate shift light system to indicate rpm and all the warning lights are also hardwired as well
The gaugeon the right is a SPA digital boost/temp gauge... been there a long time before the dash. I could replace it with whats available via the digital dash (also a LOT more accurate) - but I like the idea of having some sort of backup. The sequential shiftlight is also a perfect backup for rpm gauge, its also the main instrument I use when competing.
I've now done the "race" screens which monitor performance and give indication of faster/slower on best lap time. Gives 0-60 feet, 0-60 mph, 0-100 mph and 1.4 mile times as well. Not to mention G - forces, automatic stop watch facility, alarm messages etc.
Just have to merge and store data from ECU and datalogger on-the-fly as its a pain to correleate the two.