denmike

It seems to be set up correctly. Anyway, this time I actually got an email. Maybe something has been fixed in the past two years ?

If anyone is still using this hack (after all the LCD display can be bought on ebay for about 20 USD), then I updated the code a while ago to support the smaller displays too. It also supports vertical alignment of the text. It can still be found at the same location: https://mtech.dk/thomsen/Husky/repairs/vdo.php In case you have questions, then better send a PM to me after writing the question here, as I for some reason don't get email notifications when there is a new message here.

Sorry, I don't seem to get an email when new posts are written here, so I didn't see your question before now. Then, again, I'm not sure what you want to know? The i2c communication to the display follows the datasheet Stuart found. It contains a header and a number of bytes written to the memory of the LCD controller. It's not easy to guess which bit toggles which segment, but you can reverse engineer it from our code. 1. In my VDO unit the pins did not fit. It seems in Stuarts it does, so there seems to be many different variants. I suggest to go for one without the pins pre-soldered. 2. You can use any. It's not high-density soldering in any fashion.

If you found a problem in the program, please let me know, and I'll have a look. It works on my boat. It seems like there are different instruments around with different location of the hour-window. As far as I remember moving the text down is a bit tricky, due to the memory mapping of the OLED. If I remember correctly, it is only easy to move the text 8 pixels down at a time. You can try to edit the lines containing "128*b" to "128*b+128" (or 256, 384, etc). If this is acceptable, I will create a new version with this option for others to use. If it is not good enough it's a bit more tricky. I don't mind looking into it, though. I agree with Stuart, that the OLED is not easy to read during daylight, but it looks very nice in the dark, so I'm pretty happy. PS: It turned out that the extra line 2 (commented out in the end of the ino file) is a digital RPM, in case anyone is interested to play with that. I'm still contemplating how I can make that shown nicely in the small window.

The update has now been uploaded with all of the above features. Enjoy.

Hi guys, since I haven't heard back from Stuart since a week before Christmas, I decided to have a go at the code for myself. After all my Arduino Nano and OLED display arrived right after Christmas. Stuart helped figuring out the LCD pinout and communication protocol, so that saved me the 15 minutes, and he also found the datasheet for the LCD controller, which I'm not sure how I would have found.. Anyway that didn't really help because I still didn't know how the individual segments of the seven segment LCD display were mapped to the RAM, which equals the data being transmitted on the I2C bus. Fortunately it turned out that it's not the circuit on glass technology that sucks, it's the ribbon cable VDO used to connect the glass the the PCB that's the problem. In my case each connection had a resistance from a few kOhm up to just above 20 kOhm, which is obviously enough to break anything. Fortunately I managed to find another cable with a similar pitch in one of my boxes, so I could temporarily connect the LCD to the tachometer. To my delight it even worked! Then I could connect the LCD to the Nano and send commands to the LCD to turn on each individual segment one at a time to get the complete memory map. Next it was an easy job to convert the information to ASCII to show on the OLED display. In case anyone is still interested I've put my code here: http://mtech.dk/thomsen/Husky/repairs/index.php I plan to update it in the near future with a nicer font, possibly also a 7-segment font, and I plan to create a small tool to create a customizeable splash screen that allows non-programmers to draw a splash screen in Paint and have it shown on the display at startup.

Or you could add the link where the pages says it should be and gray it out, and maybe show a pop-up saying you need to write 5 messages first?

Maybe you could add the 5 message requirement to the faq - I didn't find it when I was searching there

Or that member didn't reach the 5 message requirement before messaging is enabled?

Looks like I have the same problem...

This is brilliant timing! I've just taken out my tachometer from the boat to replace the display. I was guessing SPI due to the number of connectors, but now if I don't have to reverse engineer the protocol that would be great. Well, if you'll be kind enough to send me the source code, that is :-) OLED is way cooler than LCD and even if it was possible to get an LCD replacement from VDO that stupid chip-on-glass solution would just break again in a few years.. My other fix is going to be to replace the bulb that breaks all the time with a red LED.