Gauges display for M400 by Wolf_Tm

[garychios]

Very cool for a street car. Nice job.

[Wolf_Tm250]

good project

the only thing that I would be concerned with, taking your eye off the road. You have to look down a ways to see those gauges.

No figgie, the most important thing is that you have not!

Because you can ( and I DID...) program the normal range for every sensor in Sensor Setup, and look at the monitor ONLY when the warning light in front of you is on!

No need to look at the monitor while ALL the values are ok...

I mean... it was worst when I had to continuously check dozen of gauges everywhere in the car!

[PWCGUY]

Wolf_TM,

You have inspired me to take on this project. My plan is to mount a 7" 16x9 high bright touchscreen in a jetski dash using a fanless IP67 rated enclosure for mobo, SSD, power supply and wifi card. I already have most of the components, loaded operating system and working on look and feel within Windows XP, see pics below. My question is in regards to automatically loading a file in ECU manager when ignition is turned on. I already know how to make the Mini-ITX boot and load ECU manager but can't figure out how to have it load a file with dash layout automatically. Only method I found was navigating manually after ECU manager opens which would get tedious every time you put the key in. Any help would be appreciated !
Thanks
Mike D.

Dash resting in mounting location

dash resting in place1.jpg (63.01 KiB) Viewed 16280 times

dash1.jpg (74.11 KiB) Viewed 16282 times

[mr2andy]

I'm not sure how Wolf_Tm does his, but what I think will work is, instead of loading the ECU manager (exe), have your start up script open the .e35 or the dash file and if you have set the extension properly, window xp should use the ECU 3.5 manager to open the file.

Hope it help!.. = )

Looking good on your setup...

[PWCGUY]

mr2andy,

Thanks for your reply. I gave this a shot. At first XP didn't know what proagram to use when launching these files so I told it to open WinEMP.exe when launching .clm and .e35 files. So now if you launch a .clm or .e35 file it now opens ECU manager but the file is not loaded. I'm not an expert with Windows and any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks
Mike D.

[PWCGUY]

We'll I found a solution using scripts to open the first .e35 file in the M800-v35 folder. I used a free open source program called "Autohotkey", link below:

http://www.autohotkey.com/download/

If you install this program and create a script, snytax below, and drop it into your Windows Startup folder along with the hotkeys program it works. Or you can create a .exe file.

Here is the syntax:

run C:\motec\M800-v35\WinEMP.exe, C:\MoTeC\M800-v35
sleep 1000
Send !F{Enter}
sleep 1000
Send {Enter}
return

[mr2andy]

Great info.. thanks for sharing buddy...!!

[Wolf_Tm250]

It was WAY easier and simpler:
you have JUST to setup Windows to HIBERNATE it anytime the power supplier switches the power off ( and this happens when you switch off the engine).
When you'll switch on the engine again, the system will resume from hibernation and you'll EXACTLY return to the page/program was opened before.

This is how I made on mine, it works perfectly, and it's THE FASTEST way to get the Ecu manager Dash gauges layout back on the monitor.

[PWCGUY]

Wolf_Tm,
Thanks for the reply. I will definitly try that. Hey I also found an easy way to remove the caption bar at the top of the window ( the bar that has the maximize / minimize and close buttons ) which will give you that screen area back for dash display. For me this is a big deal as I'm height limited and using a 16:9 screen. Using an AutoHotkey script with this syntax:

WinSet,Style,-0xC00000,A

There are also a few other simply commands that are really cool like:

WinSet, Transparent, 150, A

which makes the active window transparent / opaque so you can see behind it ( like if you had GPS software ). There is another command which could completly turn off pixels of a defined color in the active window to expose a portion of the window behind it. In this case you could insert a team logo box within ECU Manager dash display with a picture that is pure white. Then run an AutoHotkey script with this syntax and you can see information on the window behind the active ECU Manager dash layout, syntax:

WinSet,TransColor,FFFFFF,A

So little time and so many fun things to try !
Mike D.

[Turby]

I've had issues with USB / serial ports not being correctly configured when coming out of hibernation mode. I ended up with cold booting XP each time which takes around 30 seconds from power on (of which 12 seconds is before the OS even gets a look in).

Regards HD resiliency, I've been using a 2.5" notebook HD for 3 years now in a sprint car without issues. Suitbale SSDs (Solid State Hard Disks) can now be bought around the £100 mark but only come with SATA connections (you can can buy suitable IDE / SATA adapters for around £10). SSDs should give an improved OS load time as they operate around 150 MB/s, which is significantly faster than the vast majority of HD's.

Plenty of info can be found on www.mp3car.com