Thank you for visiting!

This is the new home for PicoDash, an open-source and open-architecture dashboard and vehicle monitoring system for pre-CANBUS vehicles.

Hi, I'm Ben! To contact me directly, please email benvanderjagt at yahoo.com

Vision of the project:

A modular, extensible, customizable electronic system to connect to pre-CANBUS vehicles to enable visualization of key systems, expansion of features, logging, and potentially management.

Main components:

• Primary GUI

Ideally a Raspberry Pi 4 with a trimmed OS can boot quickly for the highest-level user interface. This would generally be a large ultra-wide touch-screen with an infotainment focus.

• Vehicle Monitor

A Raspberry Pi Pico 2 interfaces with key systems, such as ignition, VSS, temperature sensor, boost sensor/MAP, O2 sensor, battery, ECU, and other hardware components.
Optionally, an LCD connects to this monitor to give a simple one-way GUI, displaying important information immediately. (This could potentially be expanded to an all-purpose system for more modest vehicle aesthetics.) Additional features can be added, such as heated seat controls, courtesy light dimmers, security, remote door locks, etc.

• Engine Management

Strictly off-road. ~_^ An additional Raspberry Pi Pico 2 can be interposed for things like fooling the MAF, controlling additional fuel systems like extra injectors or nitrous, more advanced fan, cruise, boost controllers, etc.

Configurations:

Any of these components can be used individually.

The Primary GUI can be wired up with ignition power and just a few leads for key wires, like turn signals, check engine light, and so forth. With a GPS module, it can easily display all you need to pass a typical state inspection and drive your vehicle all the time. With an Internet connection, it can also take advantage of the most common and well developed software and online services, like navigation, speech to text SMS, etc.

The Vehicle Monitor can also be wired up to the VSS, turn signals, and other key components, and it can display the most critical information to an LCD connected by HDMI. (Yes, the Pi Pico 2 can display to HDMI without CPU penalty!)

The Engine Management can be pre-programmed to start lying to the computer. Pi Pico's boot up very, very fast! They can easily read and modify data before the engine even starts.

Connecting them together makes things interesting.

The Vehicle Monitor also outputs all of the data it collects to the serial port (USB). It can easily be powered and connected to the Primary GUI with just a USB cable. The Vehicle Monitor doesn't really need its own display if the Primary GUI is collecting data from the Vehicle Monitor via USB, but both can certainly display separate information simultaneously.

The Engine Management could be configured for presets that the driver can choose on-the-fly. Scramble mode can bump your boosts up. The knock sensor can instruct your engine management to back off boost, increase fuel, and retard timing while displaying a warning. The Primary GUI can even monitor key systems for anything the driver wants to keep an eye on, such as temperature spikes, AFR out-of-range, or even ECU codes.

Customization:

Everything will be designed to be hooked up easily with the least amount necessary. The code for the Vehicle Monitor is BASIC, and hopefully we can use BASIC for as much as possible. Why BASIC? Because it hasn't had a significant change in half a century, it's human-readable, and it's good enough for everything we're doing.

Additionally, not every vehicle is wired up the same or has the same needs. Circuits and code have to be customized. Vehicle-specific code, configurations, and schematics (that you can make yourself with just a soldering iron and parts from Mouser) will hopefully be expanded as needed.

What works so far?

Frankly, I'm not good at any of this! I've made a working Pi Pico 2 with taps into the VSS and temperature sensor, and I have a dashboard that tells me how fast I'm going and what the engine temperature is. Yay! Believe it or not, that's a major step, since additional sensors are more of the same work. I'm running it on a 1986 Chrysler Laser XT Turbo, so the same device and code should work on virtually any 1980-1994 Chrysler vehicle with an 8000 ppm VSS and a resistance based coolant temperature sensor, possibly on other vehicles of the same era with just minor changes to constants in the code.