This thread may only be of interest to people who 1) Own a BX-series, 2) Have suffered repeated instrument cluster failure due to water intrusion, and 3) Are interested in embedded system development. But hey, maybe there is more than one of us!
After replacing my gauge cluster twice at ~$500 a pop, it has once again died due to moisture getting into the electronics. The most recent death struck the supposed "re-engineered" panel. So I decided it might be fun to make my own replacement.
The project is only about halfway complete, but there are enough bones that anyone interested can follow along and maybe even make contributions. I'm using an ESP32 microcontroller and a few assorted discrete components to turn the signals from the wiring harness into output on an CD panel. I started with a very nice, sunlight readable panel, but I accidentally destroyed it in a soldering mishap, so I switched to a cheaper TFT color panel for now.
The project is hosted at hackaday.io and GitHub. Feel free to take a look, ask questions, and make a pull request or two if the mood strikes you.
Here are a couple of pictures of the water damage in the gauge cluster.
You can see that some of the header pins are completely corroded away:
I am looking for a way to reuse the stock pan if possible.
My "workshop"
A prototype of the user interface:
After replacing my gauge cluster twice at ~$500 a pop, it has once again died due to moisture getting into the electronics. The most recent death struck the supposed "re-engineered" panel. So I decided it might be fun to make my own replacement.
The project is only about halfway complete, but there are enough bones that anyone interested can follow along and maybe even make contributions. I'm using an ESP32 microcontroller and a few assorted discrete components to turn the signals from the wiring harness into output on an CD panel. I started with a very nice, sunlight readable panel, but I accidentally destroyed it in a soldering mishap, so I switched to a cheaper TFT color panel for now.
The project is hosted at hackaday.io and GitHub. Feel free to take a look, ask questions, and make a pull request or two if the mood strikes you.
Here are a couple of pictures of the water damage in the gauge cluster.
You can see that some of the header pins are completely corroded away:
I am looking for a way to reuse the stock pan if possible.
My "workshop"
A prototype of the user interface:
