Any Ardunio nerds in here?

[CamaroAJ]

In my can never leave well enough alone venture with building my car I want to have a gear display on the dash. I'm wanting to use a Ardunio Nano to run a 8x8 LED dot matrix to show 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-N-R and ideally be a reverse ground input to my chassis module to signal turning on the back up lamps. GM uses a position sensor on the transmission already and its a 4 pin 5v reference sensor that appears to be a hall effect switch. Anyone here mess with Ardunio's that could help me learn them and make this setup work? From the looks of it one part of the sensor picks the left to right movement of the shifter and the other part picks up fore and aft movement of the shifter. At this point I haven't bought anything so I'm not 100% set on any particular Ardunio or LED board, but I have them in my Amazon cart already. The wiring part I can handle no problem, its the writing code for the module I have never done before.

[blitzer454]

Here's a youtube video that should help.

[CamaroAJ]

Originally Posted by blitzer454

Here's a youtube video that should help.

Thats the video that kinda started this whole ordeal lol. I ordered some parts and created an account on Arduino's cloud to start messing with this when everything gets here.

[out2kayak]

Originally Posted by CamaroAJ

In my can never leave well enough alone venture with building my car I want to have a gear display on the dash. I'm wanting to use a Ardunio Nano to run a 8x8 LED dot matrix to show 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-N-R and ideally be a reverse ground input to my chassis module to signal turning on the back up lamps. GM uses a position sensor on the transmission already and its a 4 pin 5v reference sensor that appears to be a hall effect switch. Anyone here mess with Ardunio's that could help me learn them and make this setup work? From the looks of it one part of the sensor picks the left to right movement of the shifter and the other part picks up fore and aft movement of the shifter. At this point I haven't bought anything so I'm not 100% set on any particular Ardunio or LED board, but I have them in my Amazon cart already. The wiring part I can handle no problem, its the writing code for the module I have never done before.

There are a few things that you will want to consider:

1. What temperature range will the hardware be exposed to (interior with lots of solar loading in the summer, freezing temperatures, high amount of water in the air). The Arduino hardware is not really designed for this use case.
2. What sort of shock / vibe is the hardware going to experience. Consider heavy bass radios (if your doing that sort of thing), NVH from the suspension, etc. You'll need to accommodate that in the design.
3. Is it remotely possible that the hardware is going to get wet (like window open, etc.)? Again, another design constraint.
4. How much power will need to be provided to keep things operational? Will the electrical system accommodate it?

Arduinos are fine for learning and solutions that would hang around inside of a home but, from what I've seen, the quality is not there for something I would expect to last in a harsh environment.

OK, that out of the way, why not use something like a Silicon Labs gecko board, like:

https://www.silabs.com/development-t...t?tab=techdocs

https://www.silabs.com/documents/pub...user-guide.pdf

They already have displays on the card and are very low power. Very reasonable to program as well.

We use Xilinx chips for some of our solutions that may be favorable, but the above may be easier to do what your thinking.

Example for tiny gecko GPIO input:

https://github.com/hrshygoodness/EFM.../gpiointerrupt

Here is a weather station on the tiny gecko:
https://github.com/hrshygoodness/EFM...weatherstation

If your looking to make a custom card, Oshpark (https://oshpark.com/) is pretty reasonable. I've used them for robotics. You will have to pick and place parts, though.

If you want something that is designed from the ground up to support harsh environments, consider using someone like Riverside:

https://www.riversidemfg.com/

They do a good job and are great people to work with.

Just my $0.02.