megasquirt lcd display made in china

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.

I have been looking for a way to getting rid of the tuning laptop in the car, but also a way to remove the analog instrument cluster. Like many cars my mustang gauges are not the best in the world, and are more of dummy indicators then actual gauges. Due to not great accuracy I installed like many of you aftermarket gauges for water temperature, oil pressure, and transmission temperature. I wanted to get rid of all of these, which started the project of building a digital dash that incorporated a 7" LCD Touch Screen into my stock instrument cluster housing using a Raspberry Pi 3 as the computer system.

I built the system, so the LCD screen can be mounted in the instrument cluster, and attached via HDMI cable to the Raspberry Pi in a more accessible location (behind the radio). This made it nice for being able to get to the computer without it being attached to the backside of the LCD in the instrument cluster. The dash is running a full version of TunerStudio, which gives all the many pros of tuning and the unlimited dashboards you want. I looked at the Racepak and other systems, but couldn"t get around the huge price tag. They also had big limitations on dashboards and pay extra for datalogging.

I am building the system to operate like the newer cars of a splash screen video when the computer is booting up. It then automatically starts TunerStudio and is enabled to fullscreen the dashboard upon startup. I am currently in testing of my own power supply, which will power the computer. It is designed to go through a 3-step shutdown process: turn off display screen at "X" minutes, shutdown computer at "X" minutes, then finally shutdown power supply on "X" minutes. This helps get around the many issues of most power supplies have while doing my research. Many used a manual switch, which isn"t practical in a Daily Driver. Also during quick fill ups at gas station it shutting down and then have to reboot, but also long times of not using the car draining the cars battery. It will only has 3 wires for power, ground, and ignition on one side, and then micro power plug for the computer and jumper wire to a GPIO pin to trigger the shutdown process.

Here is a video of the current state of the project. I have it booting to displaying the dashboard in about 30 secs, which I thought was pretty good.

Very cool build! I have a Rapberry Pi sitting on my desk right now with a vision of an instrument display in my old F150. Last eve I was experimenting with Tunerstudio load times and have been a bit disappointed so far with the results, but going to blame it on a very antique sd card for now... I have a lot to learn when using a Linux platform lol.

While I am waiting on parts to arrive, I decided to test the additional coding I added to the script for the shutdown process. I have been able to successfully incorporate a way to modify/configure the default shutdown delay(s) without touching the script. I put the Timer Delay File on the desktop, so it"s easy to make changes to it. Now I won"t have to mess with the script anymore to increase/decrease these times, which will go well with the programmable power supply. Still looking at incorporating the ability to Turn On/Off the LCD screen, but have not gotten there yet.

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TCL CSOT (TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd), established in November, 2009. TCL has six LCD panel production lines commissioned, providing panels and modules for TV and mobile products. The products range from large, small & medium display panel and touch modules.

Everdisplay Optronics (Shanghai) Co.,Ltd.(EDO) is a company dedicated to production of small-to-medium AMOLED display and research of next generation technology. The company currently has generation 4.5 OLED line.

Established in 1996, Topway is a high-tech enterprise specializing in the design and manufacturing of industrial LCD module. Topway"s TFT LCD displays are known worldwide for their flexible use, reliable quality and reliable support. More than 20 years expertise coupled with longevity of LCD modules make Topway a trustworthy partner for decades. CMRC (market research institution belonged to Statistics China before) named Topway one of the top 10 LCD manufactures in China.

The Company engages in the R&D, manufacturing, and sale of LCD panels. It offers LCD panels for notebook computers, desktop computer monitors, LCD TV sets, vehicle-mounted IPC, consumer electronics products, mobile devices, tablet PCs, desktop PCs, and industrial displays.

Founded in 2008，Yunnan OLiGHTEK Opto-Electronic Technology Co.,Ltd. dedicated themselves to developing high definition AMOLED (Active Matrix-Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology and micro-displays.