01 February 2022
Real small update. Still working on plans for the differential update. In the meantime, I have tried to drive the car on good weather days. Started having a problem at WOT where the power would just fall off hard, and the car would struggle to make it to the 4th gear shift point. Once it would shift, it would hit hard again, until it got back to high RPMs, and just hang back, like the engine was being limited. After blaming the tune and a bunch of other items, the simplest solution became the winner. To the point, the silicone tubes running from the airboxes to the front of the car were now collapsing under boost. This effectively choked the engine off, and made all the fun stop. Well not all. Suddenly though, the C7 Corvette we had a contest with became a contender (he still lost). Way too close! Can not have that! So now we will look towards a DCAI solution from @NeedsWings to clean up this aspect of the engine bay.

In the meantime, work has been progressing on the digital dash conversion. Preliminary firmware is working on the bench for the RealDash Interface v2.0 board that was designed in November, but has been collecting dust the last 5-6 weeks. I have pictures of it, but not handy, so I will add them later on. The steering wheel is fully interfaced, and the controls on it will now communicate via two separate CAN busses to the car. One CAN bus will go directly to the double DIN Android radio, to run it. This will be done by the right hand side buttons. The shift paddles will send messages to the CAN-C bus in the car, and after some fiddling, the expectation is that they work as if the car came with them. Lastly, the R170 does not put every shred of information about the car onto the CAN bus, like later model cars of virtually all makes do. Instead, it interfaces discrete signals, such as door ajar, headlamp settings, turn signals, etc by dedicated wires. Most of these do make their way to the instrument cluster. Some of these the instrument cluster is responsible for encoding, and putting onto the CAN bus, but most don't need the signals to go any further than a light bulb in the cluster, so that's where they stop. My current game plan will be to tap directly into the wiring harness to pick up these signals. My prototype in the pictures above incorporates an Arduino based board inside the cluster, piggy-backing on the original cluster board. This is a neat and tidy way of integrating. However, with the addition of the W205 steering wheel, there are now multiple functions relying on that interface board. By tapping into the wiring harness instead, the RealDash Interface v2.0 board will stay inside the car, separate from the cluster. This will allow a stock cluster to work, until a new replacement is constructed. This more modular approach will allow me to fully work out the bugs of the steering wheel interface, before piling on problems with the digital cluster. I expect to drive around with the new steering wheel and the old analog cluster for a few months, until the comfort level is there that the RD Interface board is working at 100%. ie, one set of problems at a time. I will add pics of some of this later on.