Xr4ti PiDash

[Foremi]

I had been planning a pidash for a while but I found a display that fits damn near perfect in the factory xr4 gauge cluster so I thought it was time to finally do it. This requires a megasquirt ecu.

Parts used
Factory cluster with everything removed except turn signal, high beam and charge indicator lights.
Raspberry pi 4 (can probably use 2GB model if you want to save some bucks- LINK
Pi cooler (the pi 4's run hot, you should at least do something to cool it) - LINK
GPS - LINK
Power Adapter for Pi - LINK
Power Adapter for display - Link
HDMI Cable - Link
Fans - Link
Serial Cable - Link
The most important part, the display. NV126B5M-N41 - Link

I put all of this in the stock cluster with power coming from the switched 12v for my ECU. It runs Tunerstudio and I made a custom dash for it.

Test Fitting the display


Removing some material from the top corners to allow the screen to sit flat


How its wired inside. The second board is the display controller. One of the fans is intake running at full speed with some filter medium in front of it, while the one next to the pi is exhaust running around half speed.


Ready for first test fit in car


Final install






A short video of the dash -
https://youtu.be/rXXiJth5-wQ

[Foremi]

Reserved

[Turbo]

Looks good, I'd be concerned about seeing it on bright sunny days while wearing shades
Also I think it might be a good idea to use some kind of vibration limiter like foam or soft rubber for the display itself.

[Foremi]

Looks good, I'd be concerned about seeing it on bright sunny days while wearing shades
Also I think it might be a good idea to use some kind of vibration limiter like foam or soft rubber for the display itself.

The display is held on by 2 layers of 3m HD foam tape. It should be fine.

I am concerned about daylight visibility as well. It’s not the brightest display in the world.

[Ed Lijewski]

I have a bare cluster frame FS if anyone wants to build one of these without using your existing cluster.

YMMV

[jkxr4ti]

Looks very nice so far. You could consider a matte screen protector. That helps in the bright sun. Not sure in your case if it would make much difference with the bezel shading the display.
I’m running a nexus 7 in the center console as a display for the MS and the matte screen protector does help there.
Curious what your bootup time is with the pi dash?
The nexus with low power sleep mode wakes up pretty quick but I would seriously consider the pi dash if the bootup is fairly quick.

[DPDISXR4Ti]

Thanks for posting this up in here. I'm glad now that I've hoarded away a few instrument clusters, both XR and Scorpio. I think I'd consider going this route for the Scorpio first, given the increased points of failure that has vs. the XR.

[Foremi]

Looks very nice so far. You could consider a matte screen protector. That helps in the bright sun. Not sure in your case if it would make much difference with the bezel shading the display.
I’m running a nexus 7 in the center console as a display for the MS and the matte screen protector does help there.
Curious what your bootup time is with the pi dash?
The nexus with low power sleep mode wakes up pretty quick but I would seriously consider the pi dash if the bootup is fairly quick.

The display itself has a more matte finish I think rather than a glossy finish. I drove it today and it was quite sunny with snow everywhere so pretty damn bright out and it was plenty bright enough, though I left my sunglasses in my other car so I did not check that.

I have not actually configured auto start for tunerstudio tbh, but total boot time is probably in the 25-30 range. I could probably use a faster sd card and I am using the standard Raspbian distro with no optimizations yet.

[jkxr4ti]

I see from a bit of research that some people are tweaking the boot parameters and getting around 10 seconds reasonably. Seems like the stock boot sequence waits for the network adapter to be ready before proceeding. Removing that wait should give you a decent reduction in time.

Looks like android fastboot can be applied to the pi as well.
There’s always the option of suspending to ram and that would likely yield the biggest gains on boot timing. The rom I’m using for the nexus tablet kills all wake timers and suspends to ram. At that point there is very little parasitic draw.

[Foremi]

I see from a bit of research that some people are tweaking the boot parameters and getting around 10 seconds reasonably. Seems like the stock boot sequence waits for the network adapter to be ready before proceeding. Removing that wait should give you a decent reduction in time.

Looks like android fastboot can be applied to the pi as well.
There’s always the option of suspending to ram and that would likely yield the biggest gains on boot timing. The rom I’m using for the nexus tablet kills all wake timers and suspends to ram. At that point there is very little parasitic draw.

Yeah, I am gonna look into making it a bit faster but I'm not super concerned. Right now after timing it last night I am at 32ish seconds from cold boot to tunerstudio launched and showing the dash fullscreen. If it were faster I'd be ok with that, but it's not really an issue or preventing me from doing anything that an extra 10 seconds would be needed for.

A faster sd card is on the list of things to get as well as some tweaks to see if they help but for now I'm happy.

I'm not sure raspbian would support android fastboot or suspending to ram would work since it has no battery/power when the ignition is off. I'm not running Android on this, its running Raspbian and full Tunerstudio.