Digital Cluster
- Thread starter AnubisZed
- Start date
I would imagine Carlife will have their version very soon as well :wink:Marcoose said:
Meanwhile, mine should be on it's way to me very soon (over the weekend), so as soon as I have it then I'll get it installed and start giving my opinion. There are differences between the E9x and the E89, so I'm hoping there won't be issues with full integration, things like;
Cruise Control indication.
MPH/KPH and not just KPH
The correct car image, ie not the 5 series that seems to appear in all photos!
Headlight, indicators, High beam etc all showing up correctly
Sport, Sport+ etc Now the thing here is that in the various videos regarding these screens is that they scroll through the different looking UI's, but what I want to know is will it change the UI when you actually press the Sport+ button?!
Anyway we'll see when I get mine installed
Good news, and some not so good news!
The good news is that I am now in possession of an E89 digital cluster and have installed it. It's working as it should and I'm starting to learn all the 'ins and outs' of it. I've attached a couple of photos for your perusal (pleased excuse the state of my dash, the rest of the car is worse, a good clean is on the cards).
I've filmed how to install it and will add my thoughts after a week of driving with it onto the video, then I intend to do a two month review on how I'm getting on with it.
Now for the not so good news....
It's not quite the plug-n-play that it was supposed to be. I was lead to believe from the start that there would be no cutting involved, but there is. Two lugs need to be cut out to enable the screen to fit in. Now I've seen other ones where the corners of the screen is manufactured at a diagonal, thus negating the need for the dash to be cut. I'm currently awaiting a reply as to whether the actual retail version will have this manufactured diagonal or whether we need to do the cut.
It's a little difficult to get in there to cut, but then I was using my multi-tool. It doesn't affect the look of the dash and would have no bearing on reinstalling the original cluster at a later date if there was a need to (ie, selling tge car and wanting to transfer the digital cluster).
Any questions then please ask, but I will include as much detail as I can in the video
The good news is that I am now in possession of an E89 digital cluster
and have installed it. It's working as it should and I'm starting to learn all the 'ins and outs' of it. I've attached a couple of photos for your perusal (pleased excuse the state of my dash, the rest of the car is worse, a good clean is on the cards).I've filmed how to install it and will add my thoughts after a week of driving with it onto the video, then I intend to do a two month review on how I'm getting on with it.
Now for the not so good news....
It's not quite the plug-n-play that it was supposed to be. I was lead to believe from the start that there would be no cutting involved, but there is. Two lugs need to be cut out to enable the screen to fit in. Now I've seen other ones where the corners of the screen is manufactured at a diagonal, thus negating the need for the dash to be cut. I'm currently awaiting a reply as to whether the actual retail version will have this manufactured diagonal or whether we need to do the cut.
It's a little difficult to get in there to cut, but then I was using my multi-tool. It doesn't affect the look of the dash and would have no bearing on reinstalling the original cluster at a later date if there was a need to (ie, selling tge car and wanting to transfer the digital cluster).
Any questions then please ask, but I will include as much detail as I can in the video
Attachments
I’m not feeling it either. It’s modern-looking, but not a leap forward in function.
I wish there was a special skin for Sport+, with simply RPM, gear, oil temp and maybe speed. All in bold and bright fonts. The one above isn’t bad. When I’m hooning, first, no FedEx van keeps up with me, and second, I only want the basics. But everything else when I’m driving wifey to a pedi.
I wish there was a special skin for Sport+, with simply RPM, gear, oil temp and maybe speed. All in bold and bright fonts. The one above isn’t bad. When I’m hooning, first, no FedEx van keeps up with me, and second, I only want the basics. But everything else when I’m driving wifey to a pedi.
Marcoose said:
So although my photo above didn't show it, this is a mock-up of what you can see if you set it to "Real Time Info" view, so you have your RPM, Speed, Gear and oil temp as well as coolant temp, battery voltage, distance and mpg. I've attached a quick photoshop of how it looks.
As for D1 - D7 and M1 - M7, I'd have to check but I beleive so
Attachments
AnubisZed said:The installation and set-up video is now LIVE
Just waiting for the full HD version to be processed by YouTube, but at least it's uploaded.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQUNAHEufHc
Great video..slightly warming to it..looking forward to part deux :tumbleweed:
B21 said:
Marcoose said:
I wouldn't get too excited about part 2 :rofl: It'll just be my thoughts on the cluster and how I'm getting on with it. I was originally going to include this in the first video, but decided to leave this just as a How-To and separate my thoughts. Hopfully I'll get this done this week
:driving:
AnubisZed said:
I wish for a review on that piney freshener that you have hanging from the mirror. How well does it keep the cabin fresh with the top down? Area of effect when windows are up vs down, etc. :roll:
ProfCJJ said:
AGL seems to be a specific open source project rather than a standard. You can read quite a lot from the sponsorship levels. There are three platinum level car manufacturers (who are probably driving the design goals and perhaps using AGL extensively) and a lot of component manufacturers at the bronze level (who are probably mostly following, and perhaps influencing the design), with a few at the intermediate levels.
The safety standards almost certainly apply to braking, engine management etc. systems rather than information systems (like the instrument cluster), except where they relate to the bus interactions [which should be isolated from the display logic, and probably always monitored rather than updated]. An instrument cluster is essentially a read-only application, and should be self-contained without any strong real-time
requirements (accurately displaying road speed is probably the most stringent requirement, but the regulations have to cover old-fashioned
needle dials - my mother's A30 used to bounce between about 25 and 35 when she was doing 30mph, depending on the state of the
cable and how worn the gearbox connector was
I'm fairly sure even amateur Linux code would be better than that!). There are hardware standards that should be followed (eg ASIL B) and you don't want the cluster to fail/reboot, but in normal use, the worst that
should normally happen is that you temporarily lose information about speed etc and need to pull over to restart the system.
Without knowing this particular panel, as a general rule, I'd expect conventional instrument panels to be less reliable than digital ones
at a hardware level (many cheap components that can fail independently and have unique applications, versus fairly standard processor and
display technology that is simply adapted to the automotive setting). The useful lifetime is a bit hard to predict. I'd expect the hardware to
be solid state, so the main risk would be the quality of the soldering, or maybe component failure.
The very worst scenario would involve replacing the failed cluster with the original one, or a new replacement.
For safety-related automotive software applications, there are other development standards that people follow, eg MISRA and AUTOSAR.
I've worked with people who have supported these. It's quite an interesting space. As you'd expect, avionics has even more stringent requirements (adding a comment to a single line of code requires the whole Airbus codebase to be recompiled and tested, and they have very strong real-time and software/hardware separation/replication requirements - they even use 3-core systems for redundancy).
