megasquirt lcd display quotation

Here’s a page with info on my recommendations for a complete system: https://www.diyautotune.com/support/faq/which-megasquirt/  This would be good to review first and would help you to make sure you get the right system to meet your needs.

This is a digital dashboard display project intended to be used with a MegaSquirt2-Extra or MegaSquirt3 ECU (engine control unit). It"s 5-inch high-brightness LCD panel and LED strip makes viewing vital car/engine information quick and easy.

The firmware currently only has the option of displaying three different screens. One demo screen, and two screen showing some live information from the Megasquirt. The screens are flipped by touching the LCD screen (it"s a capacitive touch panel).

It"s not a simple project but the result is well worth the effort! The parts are relativity cheap to buy and you end up with a completely customizable digital dashboard display that rivals $1000+ commercial units.

As this display is CANbus based, it could also be programmed to work with data from many other aftermarket ECUs from manufacturers like Haltech, Link, EMS, FuelTech, ECUMaster, Motec, Syvecs, Emtron, etc, etc. It could also be programmed to support later model factory cars via a OBDII CANbus interface.

In my case, I have a 1990 Toyota Celica GT4 (aka Alltrac) that is used as a weekend club / race car. It has been running a MegaSquirt3 + MS3X ECU for about 6 years now. Previously I have used Android tablets/phones and RaspberryPi Linux devices to view ECU information, but these devices have proven to be slow to boot, unreliable and generally not fit for use in a harsh automotive environment no matter how much they are modified.

This project however was developed for my own use. I needed a better digital dash display for my Celica, and the new Crystalfontz high brightness accelerated display was absolutely perfect for this use.

The particular Crystalfontz LCD panel (CFAF800480E0-050SC-A1-1) is perfect for this because:It"s 5-inch size, and 800x480 resolution is a good middle-ground for a dash display.

Most of the embedded graphics firmware I have personally written in the past has required rendering of graphics in a micro-controller/micro-processor display buffer, which is then pushed out to the LCD panel one whole screen at a time. This requires quite a powerful processor, a lot of graphics rendering code, and careful timing.

The EVE2 graphics accelerator does a lot of this for us. We (using the ESP32) give a list of graphic objects to display (text, lines, circles, bitmaps, etc) to the EVE2, which it then renders on the LCD for us. It"s relativity easy to use, yet surprisingly powerful.

CANbus is very flexible, simple, fast and robust. While this project could have supported the Megasquirt serial interface (and may do in the future), using the CANbus interface just makes more sense here. There is less programming needed for obtaining data from the MegaSquirt when using CANbus. The MegaSquirt ECU is set up to blindly send the data out over the CANbus; we just suck it up and display it.

We use the ESP32 to obtain Megasquirt information from the CANbus, decode it, then create a display-list (graphics objects) which we send to the EVE2 accelerated LCD panel via the SPI interface. The ESP32 also sends color/brightness data to the WS2812b LEDs via a PWM (pulse-width modulated) interface.

The ESP32 contains a CANbus interface, but extra interfacing is required between it and the actual CANbus wires that go off to the MegaSquirt. The MCP2551 CANbus transceiver chip/module does this for us.

5 volt supply is required for most of the circuitry in this project, so we need a voltage regulator to take the normal 9V to 16V present in a car (car batteries are 12V, but when a car is running its normally around 14V), down to 5V. It needs to supply up to 2 amps (the LCD backlight and WS2812b can use a decent amount of power).

This is not the quickest or simplest project around, actually it"s somewhat the opposite. You"ll need a decent amount of electronics experience to build the display, and some C programming experience to customise the display.

The hardware is built for the datalogger section, I have to start the code process. I am designing a daughter board that will integrate all these functions into a single package. Please let me know if you are interested in one. It will be a small run of probably 15-20. I am trying to target a board cost of $30. Overall, I think $75-80 for an unassembled package with display and datalog capabilities. As they say, some assembly required.

If you take 10" as "large" then there"s not much better than an iPad or Surface. Those are also much higher resolution than you can practically drive with a Teensy. I have a bunch of 10" displays from BuyDisplay and they are not particularly high resolution (1024x600) and not "sunlight readable".

If 7" is large for you then there"s some medium-high resolution displays like 1024x600 and 800x480. Once again, not sunlight readable and tablet type devices may be better for your usage.

I just got a new sunlight-readable 4.3" display from BuyDisplay. Putting it next to the old ones, it"s dramatically better. You don"t often say "night and day" but that truly is the difference with this one. But the resolution is only 480x272 so probably not what you mean by "high resolution".

Most of us decided to upgrade to a Megasquirt ECU due to either exceeding the capabilities or needed additional features that our stock system just wasn’t capable of doing.  With the installation of the DD-EFI Digital Dash you can now take your vehicle to the next level by getting rid of all of those inaccurate stock analog and aftermarket gauges.