RE: LCD Dash: Can It Be Done?? [LONG!]

[Tim Ebling <tim@surreal.com>]

I have to agree with Brad here.  As someone who used to write software for
real-time graphical displays for physical oceanographical research, I can
attest to the fact that making any kind of custom realtime display of data
is not a matter of going to Radio Shack, hooking up a few circuits, writing
some slick code in Visual Basic, and voila...  Six months of work just for
the SOFTWARE was what it took to get a decent display of oceanographic
variables in X Windows (Unix), which is an environment even relatively well
suited to the task of real-time display (and I make my living as a
programmer, incidentally...)

If you're going to make a decent custom LCD or computer-based display for
your car, you're in for a LOT of painstaking work (as the Empeg guys have
already demonstrated).

- -tim

> You make it sound like childs play. To hook it up to a serial 
> port, you
> will have to have a multiple channel A-D converter for the 
> several analog
> channels, and then some sort of logic to sample these, and 
> combine these
> and the digital channels into a data stream for the PC to 
> decode. You can
> buy boards that do this, but the only decent ones I'ves seen 
> aren't frem
> Radio Shack, and will probably still require reworking or 
> programming, or
> additional signal conditioning to get them to work exactly 
> right. And you
> have to be careful with the digital inputs, most of them need 
> to be realtime.
> 
> Brad
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