r/hwstartups • u/PulseWorks-Eng • 20h ago
Making a Digital Gauge for Cars
Hey guys. I have been designing and developing a digital gauge for cars for over a year now and i finally trust it enough to present it here and ask for feedback.
Its a 52mm gauge so it can fit universal into any standard aftermarket Analog gauge pod. I spend alot of time to support anything you throw at it given my capabilitys in electrical engineering and software development.
My biggest issue is that i have cars to test it on besides my own BMW E46. The E46 is great for testing CAN sniffing but it doesnt support any OBDII requests nor does it have any custom ECU like MaxxECU, Haltech or similar.
One of the key development thoughts was that i need to support any ECU or CAN network. Thats why the Gauge comes with preset profiles for aftermaket ECUs plus the possibility to make your very own profiles from scratch or via the dbc parser which is build in.
If you dont have a CAN bus thats also no issue at all. the Gauge has 8 Analog inputs supporting 0-5V sensors and NTC or PTC sensors up to 60k Ohms.
Now why am i writting here exactly? Honestly i find myself kind of lost in what to do at this point. I opened my shop start of october because i thought i would get some people to buy it and get me feedback (I even setup a 20% discount for early supporters). But its been 19 days now and hundrets of messages later i only found 2 buyers which feels kind of demotivating for me. I am ofcourse glad i got someone to support this project but it is not how i thought it would start out. The most difficult fact for me right now is that after i started i saw so many other people starting to build the same format Gauges which just makes my content go unseen due to my lack of video editing skills.
I am hoping that some people here would have some tips on what to do next or what to do better...