Has anyone done it?

In the not too distant future, I will be hooking up a carputer, and I want to have the Idiot panel display car stats, like water temps, oil temps etc... These figures will come from a little serial data logger I have almost completed. To display the critical information the Idiot panel displays currently I figured I could use another D/A converter to determine when the car is lighting one of the bulbs in the panel, and get the carputer to display which element it was.

I guess Im looking for ideas on products that might already be available to convert the signals to the bulbs into messages sent to the carputer, and what size LCD fits in the idiot panel space.

 

you can always get a USB relay controller, some of them have digital inputs that you can basically take the voltage from the light coming on, and use it to tell the computer that one of the inputs is on, and have the computer show somethin on the LCD

and as for the size, you could always get or or 2 character displays, there are a lot of different sizes.., you'd have to find out what looks best to you