As promised, here are our final gauge cluster themes. There are two. The primary theme we call viewport.




The secondary theme is called darkwave.



These two themes each have their own personality. The darkwave theme is has a simpler interface with less bells and whistles while still being functional and easy on the eye. To contrast, the viewport theme is built from the ground up for eye candy.

Not shown is our own, rather ugly, diagnostics theme. It shows us all the details about what is happening in the vehicle at any given time. This ability to quickly program in new data on our gauge was extremely helpful while testing our vehicle on the road and on the dynamometer.

All of this functionality links rather nicely to our (also linux based) infotainment center. There we can change themes, view vehicle info, listen to music, and watch movies. Here you can see an example where the infotainment center has notified us of a problem with the vehicle. If you look closely, you can see the notification is overlaid on the theme gauge cluster theme changing interface.

The team just returned from competition, and despite a few setbacks, the gauge cluster was a resounding success. As a result, we were able to win 1st place for Static Consumer Acceptability (SCA). SCA judges look at the driver experience, fit and finish, and comfort of the car. The ability to do customizable themes was especially impressive to the judges. The well implemented gauge cluster was cited as a specific reason we won in that category.

With the Efika MX a team of (very time-limited) college students were able to do something that the OEMs are still developing themselves. By leveraging well-documented open-source tools (python and pygame) we were able to be extremely productive. Also, Genesi provided a huge amount of support (hardware and software). Without them, this project would not have been possible.

I'll post soon with some final pictures of our gauge cluster themes.

Well, it's been a long time coming, but we've finished our second prototype of our Efika MX based digital gauge cluster. Here's what we did:

Ported the top-level gauge cluster code to python and pygame.

Implemented a CAN to TCP relay. This allows us to read vehicle information from our entertainment center. The gauge cluster also now links into this same relay for its CAN link.

Added support for themes. Themes can now be loaded at run time. The plan is to make an interface to change themes on our entertainment center.

I'll try and post some pictures soon. We have three themes in the works. Two of them are exciting, and the third is great for working on the car and debugging our controls strategy.