Haha. I used to work with Motec at my old job and wanted something similar without the Motec tax and this was the closest I could get 🙃

 

Nice job. What displays are you using? Would be possible to let me know what displays are you using?

 

FanyiTek 4" 4 inch 720P Circle Displays with Driver Board
These are 300 nit. I have some 1000 nit versions from another brand coming from Alibaba

 

Any alternatives to Realdash? Getting this to work right with Linux has been a ******* nightmare. The developer is behind on dependencies and work arounds have had mixed results.

 

I found your posts on the realdash forums. Looks like you're having fun getting the arm version of realdash to work on your rpi5 and displaying on 2 screens. I'm not familiar with any good alternatives, and I'm a bit behind your in my custom digital screen journey. It would be nice to ditch the ADU5 dash for digital gauges.

I recommend looking into Simhub dash, which is made for sim racers, and see how to get it to display CAN data.

Or use a Nextion display:

Or Simhub with a Nextion display:

CAN to esp32 to Nextion:

Or:
Can to serial to a Nextion gauge seems the way to go.

 

I did also think on using these Nextion "intelligent" screens. Indeed, I've made some simulations but I think stetic results were not as good as Realdash option and to be honest, for me it was not that hard to get it installed in a DietPi, there was just a dependency that I solved manually, the rest was quite straight forward.

 

Yeah it seems RealDash is the way to go. I didn't know about DietPi and I need to give that a shot. I did solve the dependency issue, I just have a problem with it accessing local folders when I call to load a file and such. The current work around is to upload through the website.
The problem with opening files was resolved with an update to the x86 version when I was running a mini PC, the same problem exists now that I switched to ARM, it basically needs the same update, but my work around will have to do.
Since I can't get the app to full screen or maximize across both displays, I will have to run two of the Rpi5 units. Unless you figured out how. I've tried third party apps to resize Realdash but Realdash doesn't want to play.

My last fun thing is making text or gauges appear and disappear under conditions. I've played with it in simulation and I can only get something to trigger one way, but not both ways. When I condition a gauge to appear, making it disappear causes it to wig out. There needs to be better documentation or examples.

Currently I'm trying to have a notification that the ignition is on, then if other conditions are met, the ignition message disappears and a "start ready" appears. Also I would like custom visual alarms that aren't the baked in full screen ones. I have all the proper CAN data for this, I can condition them correctly, but the actions are still a bit nebulous on how they work with a hysteresis situation.

edit: according to an AI search the gauge or container needs an initial "look and feel" visibility at 0. Its wild that through all the searching on the forums and AI did the digging I couldn't. I'll test this tomorrow.

 

What bootloading times are you guys seeing on the Pi? I know it varies depending on the OS and what features are removed, but it appears to take 12-20 seconds from ignition on for the screens to display realdash gauges, meanwhile, Nextion looks like it boots within a 2 seconds.

Where in realdash are you able to make warnings pop up? I'm struggling to configure basic gauges and replicating the techs you guys made.

 

Haven't timed mine yet but that sounds right.
Warnings can be made under triggers followed by an action. Warnings are an action listed item. Or you can customize and have a image or text "gauge" fade in.
If you use the fade action you need to make a trigger and action for it to appear and a separate trigger and action to make it disappear.

I found out there is a bug that may make the action not work as intended during design and my fix has been to start over with the gauge, trigger, and action. So save often.

 

I got my 1000 nit screens in, and they, as expected, have a bad contrast ratio and the blacks are pretty gross looking. But it was worth a shot, I'll keep these around in case I absolutely need to move to them.
For now I'll stick with the 300 nit units.

 

Although mine is a bit different, I'm seeing about 30 seconds altogether, from turning the key to having the gauges populated and ready. Although most of that time is from the TunerStudio software starting (so that wouldn't affect you), and some black screen for a few seconds before the Pi even kicks on. The difference in booting from an SD card vs an NVMe SSD seems to only be a second or two.

I was planning to keep working on it until I could get it near instant, but I think I'll be switching gears a bit to a different setup.

 

When I was building my pi system, I made it so that it waits for some preset number of minutes after the ignition is off before it shuts down. That at least eliminates the reboot issue when you are at the gas station or corner store.

 

Are you using realdash? What OS are you running and what's your boot time? Post a pic of your setup!

 

The thing I’m doing is a little different. I wanted to add some additional gauges but I don’t really love gauge pods so I started looking at CAN gauges and then decided to make my own. So I used an AEM sensor to CAN module to collect data and a Raspberry Pi program to send the CAN data to a display that goes where the radio normally does. I think that most people want a fancier display, but I’m trying to be more retro. It’s GTK4 based, so there’s a lot of flexibility in the way it looks. You can use just about any sensor or even different CAN sources.

Most of this is totally irrelevant to this thread, but I do like the fact that it waits an hour after you turn the car off to power down which means that you are probably only booting once a day (and uses zero power when its off). It’s straight up Ubuntu, so it boots in whatever time that Ubuntu boots.

 

Switched out the mini pc for two rpi5 units, just having a hell of a time getting both screens working with one PC. It makes more sense at this point to use two CPUs for this.