Pillar gauges

[Celticsfan03]

Who here has pillar gauges and where did you find the pillar pod for them?

[Duncan]

Are you going for a "period correct" build, I haven't seen them in a really long time.....

I'd check the japanese brands in the hope they have a higher quality / better match to factory; if ebay has some I'd expect them to be pretty crap

[Murray_Calavera]

Would you really prefer pillar gauges over something like this?

https://www.haltech.com/product/ht-067010-haltech-ic-7-digital-dash-kit/

Or if you can spend more, this?

https://www.haltech.com/product/ht-068000-haltech-uc-10/

I could write a thesis about how much better a modern dash is compared to a series of gauges. 

[GTSBoy]

I'm at the point of seriously starting a project to build and Arduino/mc (of some sort) based multigauge to go in the console where triple gauges normally sit.

I have found a screen of the right dimensions. I would need to 3D print a bezel/housing to make it mount up pretty. That's doable.

I would need to come up with interfacing circuitry for the EGT thermocouple. I'm sure there will be examples of that into Arduino out there somewhere. Ditto with characterising the output of the existing boost gauge's MAP sensor and the oil T gauge's thermistor.

And then, because it is a screen, it can be controllable, so it can show more than the 3 gauges I currently have. So I can come up with a list of other things I want to be able to show on it that can be reasonably easily handled via an Arduino's inputs.

I do not need this project. But the stepper gauges I'm using are giving me grief. It's time to come kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

[Murray_Calavera]

@GTSBoy Wouldn't you just prefer to have a modern dash though? 

Even if you could wave a magic wand and have the fancy gauge cluster your describing, a modern dash would do a million more things and do a better job of it. 

[GTSBoy]

1 hour ago, Murray_Calavera said:

@GTSBoy Wouldn't you just prefer to have a modern dash though? 

Even if you could wave a magic wand and have the fancy gauge cluster your describing, a modern dash would do a million more things and do a better job of it. 

Yes, but no. I wouldn't want an IC7, because I think they are ugly, cramped and most of the displays I've seen are garish (and granted the last bit can probably be avoided). I wouldn't want to pay for the UC10. Probably wouldn't want to pay for the IC7, for that matter.

And, it's an R32. I have cable drive speedo. Although, thinking about it, that's not a big obstacle, because at least I can throw the electronic sender back into the R33 box and then find a way to emulate the original (R32 or R33) speedo head's conversion of the saw-tooth AC speed signal into the square wave that the ECU wants, without the 1990s approach of hiding a gutted speedo head behind the dash. (another Arduino project, no doubt).

I like the technical aspects of the big digital dashes, but I aesthetically and just general originality and feel-wise, like the original dash enough. More? Yes, more. If I had a UC10 I'd want to make the dash look as close to the original one as possible most of the time, and only flash up "DANGER TO MANIFOLD" when it needed to.

But the other aspect of the 3-DIN slot digi gauge that I'm contemplating is that I'm a tinkerer and can barely resist a project, even if I don't need to add another to the list of unfinished ones. And I think there's enough precedent of others out there that have proven which equipment works (ie, is not washed out, or slow, or prone to failure, or all the other problems that can afflict such a project). I'm not quite enough of a micro-controller tech head that I know the best way to approach all of these decisions, and so striking out on my own to achieve it years ago would have led to unhappiness. But now, it seems like a project that I can actually achieve on the first or second go, with only a few sleepless nights. And that's why I'm actively thinking about it now. I would much rather have a thing in my car that I made from more-or-less scratch that does what I want, rather than something that someone else made that does some of what I want, not other stuff I want, and/or annoys me in some fashion. If I'm going to be annoyed, I need it to be my fault, so I know who to blame, and who needs to fix it.

As an example of that - I have surveillance cameras at home. No, I did not go buy a kit with a DVR and 4 or 8 or 16 off-the-shelf cameras in a kit. No, I did not want to use any sort of could service to record or access the feeds and recordings from outside the house. No, I bought my chosen cameras directly (from China, lol) and built the DVR myself using a couple of different (ie, this was attempt 1 and attempt 2 to get a system I liked) software packages, running on Linux, with the server being a virtual machine running Proxmox. I found a way to offload the image recognition part of the system to a dedicated AI processing board (a Coral TPU, for anyone who cares) with the hardware passed through to the server on the VM, motion detection offloaded to the GPU, all storage is local in the home network, accessible from outside via my own self-hosted VPN). All done so that I could seal off the Chinese cameras in their own network where they can't access the internet and dial home to the CCP and backdoor my network. All things that you can't have if you do what is commercially available. And even with all the f**king around it has still cost a fraction of what it would cost to buy commercially.

[niZmO_Man]

On 21/03/2025 at 5:41 AM, Celticsfan03 said:

Who here has pillar gauges and where did you find the pillar pod for them?

Japan.

Australia maybe.

Definitely Bing.

[MBS206]

9 hours ago, Murray_Calavera said:

@GTSBoy Wouldn't you just prefer to have a modern dash though? 

Even if you could wave a magic wand and have the fancy gauge cluster your describing, a modern dash would do a million more things and do a better job of it. 

No.

I hate modern dashes.

They're so stupidly bright all the time. It's like having a laptop in front of you.

The car with my favourite dash is my LandCruiser, as it will go down so dim that you really can't see it. Absolutely brilliant for night time driving!

[GTSBoy]

11 hours ago, MBS206 said:

The car with my favourite dash is my LandCruiser, as it will go down so dim that you really can't see it. Absolutely brilliant for night time driving!

That's how the huge janky reostat that was fitted to my car for compliance is set. The white LEDs are barely getting enough volts to come on.

[Duncan]

You need to buy a Saab Matt, ours had a button that turned all the dash lights off.

Any decent aftermarket dash has sufficient brightness control and a headlight input for day/night settings.

None of which probably helps OP

[MBS206]

1 hour ago, Duncan said:

You need to buy a Saab Matt, ours had a button that turned all the dash lights off.

Any decent aftermarket dash has sufficient brightness control and a headlight input for day/night settings.

None of which probably helps OP

See, that button sounds like perfection Duncan!

My eyes really don't like light shining at them from a dash when I'm driving. Being part red colourblind, I've found for most cars that I can change colours on, I set everything to red, so my eyes see the elast amount of colour!

I miss normal gauges in cars