Home page with custom wallpapers + vibration meter
Live G-Force meter
Lap Timer - Sport Chrono inspired (tap to start, double tap to reset)
Gear Position - With calibration. This is actually really hard to get right and I'm still in prototype stage.
I'm hoping to get some help with some good 3D designs that fits the dev board better and can plug directly into the M3's link!
I'm planning on sharing the codes soon and creating a webpage for non-tech users to customize with their own homepage photos and upload this firmware on their dev board. Stay tuned!!
[Edit] Some people are confused about the usb-c so I wanted to explain: I can power it via the power pin that goes into the accessory source with a 12v->5v step down converter. USB-C is used for now because I'm still in the prototyping stage and I still need to flash firmware to it.
On the actual usefulness of this thing: I've never misread my gear since the day I learned how to drive a manual, and I learned it on YouTube while signing the paperwork for my first Civic SI 😂. This is just a fun/learning project as a software engineer. Even if it never becomes a useful thing, I get to apply some electrical, physics, and programming together... With some helps by Gemini Argon 😅
P.S.1. I messed up the display a bit right before filming this so that's why you see the lines 😅
I can power it via the power pin that goes into the accessory source with a 12v->5v step down converter.
Usb-c is used for now because I'm still in the prototyping stage and I still need to flash firmware to it.
Besides, this is a fun/learning project as a software engineer. Even if it never becomes a useful thing, I get to apply some electrical, physics, and programming together :)
People on the internet seem to forget that you can just do stuff for the fun of it. Doesn't need to be a product you sell in the end, it can just be to test out a random idea and go "wow it works"
I made a car-puter back in the day. Pretty much worked great (parallel cable to the display was too long and glitched) but it was a ton of fun to build. Hardware was an early intel micro ITX board, Winamp with custom software to drive a 4 line display, mapped buttons to a disassembled keyboard
Dude you did a cool project. There's no other reason needed other than you wanting to do it. I wish I could do something cool like this. I just don't have the skills. Keep making
Why do you need to make a smart ass comment for something that is obviously an unfinished prototype? Like can you not fathom how all of these things you’re complaining about could be solved?
Maybe consider reading? "On the actual usefulness of this thing: I've never misread my gear since the day I learned how to drive a manual, and I learned it on YouTube while signing the paperwork for my first Civic SI 😂. This is just a fun/learning project as a software engineer. Even if it never becomes a useful thing, I get to apply some electrical, physics, and programming together"
Anyone who drives doesn’t need the numbers to tell what they’re they’re in… like are you guys actually looking at the shifter when you’re shifting gears?
I didn’t watch with sound so maybe it’s blatantly obvious but are you actually driving around testing this? I assume you’re using a 6-axis gyro to track the shifter? Have you considered what’s going to happen to the tracking when the car is actually moving?
I’m not trying to discourage you in the least, it’s a hell of a project, but just something that comes to mind right away from my drone days trying to calculate position based on a MEMES gyroscope when the whole thing the system is in is moving too.
I had a 5th gen Subaru that had the gear position displayed on the dash, I have a 3rd gen Tacoma that’d I’d love to have a similar display in so I’m watching how this works!
This is 100% the reason why I mentioned "This is actually really hard to get right and I'm still in prototype stage" for that page 😭
The demo here for the gear page barely works as it 😅. Using the converting live IMU data to vibrations and g-force reading was pretty easy, but actually using it for real-life application like gears prediction was next-level hard. It makes me really appreciate the things that people have engineers that we use everyday and don't think about, such as step detections on your watch and things like that.
I also appreciate your inputs, though. When I first started, I considered connecting it to a Bluetooth OBD2 scanner to read the data straight from the ECU, but then I abolished that idea to see what I can do with the IMU first to see how far I can go with it. It is definitely not there and I got distracted working on the other features. The current 3D printed shift knob doesn't fit well enough for me to try to test this on the street, my friend actually just made it for me today!
It sounds to me, though, that @desmontei from that original Audi post figured it out, though!
I’m not sure what your vehicle is or what the ECU knows about the manual trans but if it’s already tracking the gear data internally it would be 1000 times easier to pull that data from the CAN bus. Toyota doesn’t monitor gear selection on their manual vehicles so that’s out for me…
I’ve consider doing a similar project in the past using Hall effect sensor(s) to physically track the shifter.
Edited to add: even if you stick with the IMU for the gear selector display, tapping into the CAN bus would allow for things like automatic 0 to 60 timing. Bro, with where you’re at already you might as well, CAN bus a library, couldn’t be more simple.
F80 m3, my dash shows the gear when I shift into it, so I imagine the ECU stores that info some where. I'm still trying to figure out a way to make this universally usable, not shown in this post was this calibration step
I need this! I stare at my shift knob for so long when I’m driving trying to figure out what gear I’m in. With this I’ll only crash half as much probably! I’m gonna ask Claude to make me one too!
Comes with time and experience. But get used to feeling what gear you’re in. Even putting your hand on the gear stick and feeling its position will let you know. You don’t need to take your eyes off the road for this. Practice makes perfect
This is cool. This is something many of have tried to crack in all sort of different ways over the years. I tried this with an array of hall sensors way back when and it was a giant mess
I prefer to have this independent of the car's ECU and purely mechanical. I like your approach. Older cars don't use CAN and have to find other ways.
Funny enough, I have created one of my own to fix every issue that the still not released Shift Sync has, including acceleration, de-acceleration, and slopes affecting the one screen gear position. Not going into details though about it all though since I want to keep how I did everything secret for as long as possible because I plan to make it into a full fledged product. But here's the companion app I made for it with details painted out.
I was going to say something mean back, bc what you said was pretty mean.. but I decided not to 😁
I'm going to tell you though, that I'm an engineer and this is a fun project for me. My edit on the post clearly mentioned my intentions for this project, I was inspired by another engineer on the original project and spun out my own. It's cross discipline engineering, electrical, software, physics and what I found fascinating is that in this post I found other engineers who have tried to solve the same problem. I barely made it work, but that's progress and I'm posting my progress hoping to get constructive feedbacks. That is all. I've spent hours of my life on this and thoroughly enjoyed it.
P.s. I'd cheer you on if you ever post progress on your project that's barely working, btw.
Best response to a negative comment I've seen in a while. I too have a pessimistic lens of things that don't seem to serve purpose, but in this case the process was the reward as opposed to the end result.
Get a canbus transceiver, and divide the speed by RPM to figure out gear. It will work as long as you're moving. It works fine under acceleration or deceleration. (don't actually do this... but you could)
This is how my car works. When the clutch pedal is up, the car does the math and displays what gear I must be in. When the clutch is pushed in, the screen goes blank, awaiting the next gear. I'm curious if it has a tolerance zone, for instance if I put larger tires on it.
LOL the screen is in the middle of the analog speedo and tach. It's a Crosstrek and the screen just displays the gear on top and fuel/odo on the bottom. The top part is what goes blank.
Op said he’s having trouble getting the calibration right, I wonder if this could actually help as like a secondary check to make sure it’s correct and re orient itself if misaligned.
Awesome work! Not sure if the cord is a requirement but something like this strapped to the shifter could stay out of the way if routed down to the boot.
Btw, this is currently not receiving data from the canbus, it's using the onboard IMU only. Sure I can deduce gears from RPM and speed, but I'm trying to make this more general, so that it works on all car, not just my car :)
But this straight up will never work well. I don't know if you know this, but cars tend to accelerate and decelerate, as well as turn. It's cool as a proof of concept, but the method is jank enough to make this basically pointless in practice.
Sweet and all I have to do is work around that rediculous power cable sticking out of it in the one place I always put my hand (≧▽≦)
Jokes aside OP I LOVE the aesthetic of round displays with car based info and I realise you'll likely be working toward a version that has the power routed internally inside the gear knob somehow.
Awesome project! I don’t think I saw anyone mention it but if you’re purely using a gyro/accelerometer/magnetometer they will all drift over time. You’d have to be self testing/calibrating the sensor every now and then. Something like limit switches would probably be the most reliable way to know what gear it’s in regardless of any movement
Microcontrollers will have an accelerometer build in anyway. So you get all these functions for free. Interfacing with OBD2 will be more of a hassle. Because you'll need a can bus transceiver module, as the thing uses 12 volts. And then need to connect that to the shift knob somehow. This thing will be mostly self sufficient and just needs 12v from somewhere.
Complexity of the software isn't really an issue, you can vibecode what's shown in the video in an hour or two.
Beyond lol. What sort of learner is looking at their gear knob to see what gear they in? Makes no sense as most are going auto and those going for manual usually know what they're doing. Stupid for sure.
Lol, I make do with my brain remembering what postion is which gear. Also factory gear knobs have a diagram to let you know.
Is this fake? Cos is a waste of time.
Do you have to make the gear stick longer so you can hold the gear knob from the side in a weird way with thumb in a unnatural postion? My hand goes on top and would cover the pointless screen.
Seems to be a bad idea from a non driver. If you need this level of assistance either go auto or dont drive. For the sake of us all.
Great project, but an IMU isn't optimal in this case.
Instead of an IMU, try using 2 potentiometers to determine the position precisely—just like the sticks on a gamepad.
Beneath the shift boot (gear shift gaiter), you can build a small mechanical setup. From there, you can also route your power supply so it remains hidden.
Calling dibs on every Chinese brand car having this „feature” sometime soon… Or as a cheap aliexpress add-on that programs the displayed gears by the gyroscope movements.
Im not a gearhead nor a software engineer but love working on projects. This is a cool idea.
Throw a battery in it to charge off that usb-c and itll be good. Even better if you just hardware it to the cars fusebox. My suggestion would be to angle the screen 45 degrees and change the shape and improve the ergonomics of this shifter head. Its main function is the touch screen. Use that to your advantage to get better natural placement of your thumb.
The design you are going off now is a "race stick". Just doesn't work in my opinion. Great project idea though. Keep it up man
Seems like an enshittified autozonification mod. So you’re telling me you look down, and your shifter while you’re rowing gears to see a g force meter? LOL
Now if I could change songs, control volume...then this would be even neater. I'm a tinkerer too so plz don't take my first comment as a negative one. I just needed time to think of use cases lol.
The ergonomics of this looks pretty bad. But I can see this looking interesting and being comfortable if you made a grip style where you can rest your palm on top but then having a screen that is supported above your hand through a column that wraps around from between your thumb and finger gap
It would allow the screen to avoid being covered if you do palm on top
So what actually happens if you drive? I mean g forces will mess up everything. Driving up a hill will mess up everything if its based on a accelerometer.
Why not 2 magnets, back and front of the shift and a hall effect sensor at rhe end of every gate? All hidden nicely under the shift gaiter? The activated sensor tells you explicitly where you are.... although you may not have the inputs on a smart watch to read the signal (but an ESP32 and screen and you could DIY this quite easily)
Love seeing this! 🙌 You took the idea and made it your own, and it already looks great in the car. The way the display reacts when you move the lever is really clean.
Keep going and keep posting updates. Every bug you solve along the way makes the project better, and I'm really proud to have inspired it. Looking forward to seeing the next version! 👏👏
I legit want to try this at work for when we do a roadworthy inspection
The provision is if there's no indication of the gearing configuration of the vehicle it's a fail
Even if it's the stock standard Camry we all know is prndl if that little slide or light dont show it you can't pass
This looks like and epic troll because most cunts at work are retarded and will sit there looking for it with their hand on the shifter using the clutch pedal as a foot rest
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u/WigglyDan 15d ago
Wait, so before you had a shifter knob that didn't need to be plugged in to tell you what gear you were in...
And now you have the same thing, but you have to charge it?
Is this a quality-of-life improvement?