BMW 3.0 CSE

The car is running but there are a lot of electrical gremlins that I need to find and fix.  Now that I have the car home, I'll have time to work on all these.  

 My first attempt at programming a simulated analog gauge entirely via software was OK but didn't have parity with my digital version and was missing some features such as cruise control, warning icons, and power mode.  So I worked on it some more.

You've read about the fancy digital dash app I've written that displays all sorts of information on a display in the hole that used to belong to the tachometer.  But that still leaves four other analog gauges in the instrument panel: The speedometer, clock, fuel, and temperature gauges.  These are old school VDO gauges that just look proper and cool so I want to make them all work with this new digital vehicle.

With the first BMW CSE out in the real world, driven everyday, I'm getting lots of good feedback for improvements to the dash app. Now that I have access to CAN messages from the BMS there's a lot more data to consume/display.

Recall, I'm trying to add a digital dashboard display in the round hole normally filled by the tachometer of the stock BMW instrument cluster.  It is a gorgeous set of VDO instruments set in a French walnut real wood cluster.  I want to keep as much of the original look as possible but there is no need for a tachometer.  The speed of the Tesla motor is many times faster than a gas engine and basically irrelevant.  Instead, I'd like to know what gear I'm in, the state of my batteries, the most critical temperature of the components, my remaining range, output power, etc.

The theory has been proven.  We drove Paul's coupe for the first time!  While my car is still a ways away from moving under its own power again, we got Paul's on the road, complete with a working prototype of my dash app.  

I have the motor controller for the Tesla motor and plan to integrate that with a Raspberry Pi micro computer over a CAN bus for instrumentation (not using it for gear selection -- there are 12v inputs on the controller for gear selection so I plan to fab a unit with detents and a delay relay that will integrate with the original BMW automatic shifter but that's a future project).