Still driving the car fairly regularly without any major issues. Our other Crossfire has been repaired well enough to go back into daily driving status until we begin bodywork on it in a few weeks. Still need to send out the SRT-6 wheels for refinishing, although that is now a priority, and should be done this week. A total shop reorganization has been underway, as I shift car platforms on a more permanent basis from the Dodge SRT-4's that have pretty well dominated the shop for the past 16 years, to the Crossfire. This has meant that all of the Neon parts have come off the shelves from long term storage, and Crossfire parts going in their place. This sounds odd, and maybe even trivial, until one sees the mess that is caused by several cars' worth of parts this really represents. At one point, there were no fewer than 7 Neon SRT-4's here at any given time, and that means several engines, transmissions, and just about any part or body panel for that platform you could imagine. Now preparations are being made to part company with all of those, and move away from project-car neons. Sounds silly, but it is cataclysmic around here

The past couple of evenings, I decided to jump back into my Real Dash project. There was a push on this last winter, and then it was put aside as the weather got warmer. The goal is to finish this up, get it reliable, and deploy it out to this Crossfire in the next few months. When it was last fiddled with it, a Crossfire instrument cluster was modified to accept a 12.3" LCD, an Arduino and interfacing electronics integrated in, all pushed to a Khadas VIM3 single board computer (SBC) running Android Pie. From there, a USB hub with a requisite CAN adapter did the final interfacing to the electronics. Then the setup was mocked up with all of the pertinent Crossfire electronics on the bench, and wired up into the dash. Also added in was an Innovate Motorsports LC-2 wideband O2 setup, fuel pressure sensor, oil pressure sensor, and a few other items.



Don't mind the mess in the background - all of that represents progress! At the point this pic was taken, the plan was to swap in the SRT-4 engine into the Crossfire, and so the dash layout was modified with the appropriate logo:


Here the electronics driving all of this was a hybrid between Crossfire elements and a Chrysler NGC-3 (CAN) PCM that would run the 2.4 turbo engine. The Crossfire ECU data stream had already been decoded to determine that they spoke a similar enough CAN message language that everything was going to play along pretty well. Now that the car is actually running the M113K, logos will likely change. With RealDash, that is a pretty easy thing to do.

The last couple of evenings, the focus has been the W205 steering wheel. I had had trouble with the LIN bus that talks to this steering wheel, but last night a major breakthrough occurred, and it is now spitting out data for most of the buttons. More work has to be done to get the following working:
1. Shift Paddles
2. Horn Button
3. Button LED backlighting

Now that there is good communication between the Arduino device and the steering wheel, this will be time intensive, but attainable.

There are ways of dealing with interfacing to the wheel, without resorting to the LIN bus, but I like the idea of the LIN bus, because it will allow the use of the current Crossfire clockspring. The original clockspring has wiring for the airbag, but also two wires for the horn button, but nothing more. This constrains most projects like this. LIN bus needs +12v, ground and LIN; three wires. Ground can be picked up via the steering wheel itself, and the two horn buttons will be re-utilized to carry +12v and LIN - problem solved!

The Arduino will interpret the button inputs, and do several things. First, it will break out the horn button signal, and trigger a relay to restore proper horn function. Second, the buttons will control the RealDash, along with encoding certain functions, like volume, voice command, and phone answer/hangup onto a private CAN-B bus, which will feed into the double DIN Android radio head unit in the car. This brings modern controls to this platform. Thirdly, the Arduino will interpret the shift paddles.

The Arduino is also attached to the CAN-C bus, which is the main CAN bus in the Crossfire. It will read gear selection position to ensure the car is in Drive. If it is in Drive, then it will pass along the same CAN messages that the shift lever module does to the TCU to enable the exact same functionality as the Autostick. Doing it this way gives paddle control, without the potential for check engine lights, TCU issues, etc.

So still just a start, but that is the overall strategy. To be proper in the end, it all has to work perfectly, and look like it belongs there. Keeping things neat and clean are important. If it looks like it came there from the factory, then it should function that way, too. If both of these are true, then there is built in reliability and maintainability. These are more important than performance, in my view.