Beta released! I am working on a tool that gathers all sorts of data from Beamng and sends it to your Arduino so you can power a Arduino dashboard (with LEDs and such). I want to know if a tool like this is wanted by the BeamNG community so I will be showing a few things about it and you guys can tell me what you think! Currently I am working to power Canbus instrument clusters using this tool, also a small WIP:
We are currently working on this as a group project for school, and we dont want it to leak it out so we assigned it to certain people so we can control who is using this ATM.
If its an tacho with analog signals it is a pain in the butt as you need to recreate those signals (PWM/FM), even this fairly modern BMW E46 tacho is half canbus half analog. Fuel and speed are analog, speed requires a pulse with 50% duty cycle at 10V and 1770hz for 250km/h. RPM gauge and temp gauge are using canbus and were easily fixed. So the best way of building this is using a cluster thats using 100% canbus, atleast for speed and RPM.
Im not an electronic specialist by any means so I'm not quite sure what connection my Tacho has. I know it has like a few connection studs on the back. I guess they are for power and the engine sensor signal. Also I only have the Tacho. No electronics what so ever
If the car is from ~1997-2000 or later chances are it has CanBus, canbus works fairly easy as you can send the RPM value of the game to the tacho without too much hassle, analog gauges however need recreated pulses like they are in the vehicle before they can read them.
Here is a powerpoint presentation containing the videos of the latest version, just run the presentation fullscreen and let the videos play and enjoy https://www.dropbox.com/s/pb5vc9bsxa5ad39/Beamng.pptx?dl=0 let me know what you think!
Very nice! i have an E46 speedo aswel but i've seen it's a struggle to get it to work because of the canbus. E36 is apperantly easier. Do you have an update on the project?
We tried to get it working on an E39 cluster which is comparable with the E36 one, these clusters only accept pulses like 6000 rpm is 3000 combustions multiplied with the amount of cylindres. This is kind of to much for the arduino to handle it cant keep up. The E46 one is half canbus and with the right (cheap) hardware its very easy to control canbus (tacho and temperature gauges are canbus) and light with codes/software. The speed signal is 1770kH for 255km/h which we aquired by modifying the pwm signal on the arduino but as you can see in the demo videos it sometimes skips or loses track as it is very demanding for the arduino (imagine doing this for every gauge on the cluster). Currently the project is on hold due to summer break but we have a good base and I am thinking about releasing a (yet limited) version of our software so people can explore. The software we made consist of 1 windows tool that gathers the games info and outputs ot to com connected devices (such as arduino) and an arduino script to power the gauge cluster but the code can also be modified to power leds on your arduino breadboard. Dont know if you've downloaded the powerpoint presentation but that basically is our final product currently.
I tried this a while back with the gauges from a salvaged demolition derby car (Geo Prizm, a Toyota Corolla clone), but ran into issues, because when I switched cars, the game would crash with no error code whatsoever. It's really cool to see this working! Will you be releasing files?
There doesnt seem to be a real interest in this somehow.. so I am not sure if I will release everything we have as is.. I will and maybe can help with your stuff. 2 cars seems to screw up our gauges as welk als it reads the 2 values (one idle and one driving at 4000rpm) results in our gauges moving up and down between 900rpm and 4000rpm.
i think this is super cool, and will be perfect for my setup (trying to make the most realistic virtual cockpit), so if you could pm the files that would be super awesome.
Our software (and some hardware from Arduino) is optimalized for BMW E46/E90 so I recommend you get one of those gauges first
Any news of this Project? Wiring Diagram,Tutorial Help with wiring would be great Hardware I have everything so far. ARDUINO uno or Mega, Canbus shield I already supplied Clusters with electricity
You need an Arduino Can shield and you have to know how to convert a numeral rpm value to a form which the cluster can read.
