[mudder]

I got the controller PCBs a few days ago, and had time to assemble the 4 of them today. Tomorrow I will power them on and, assuming the microcontroller works properly, write some code to test everything else to make sure it also works!

View attachment 92145
View attachment 92146

That's a lot of small parts on a small PCB!
I can't remember the last time I specified an 0402 on anything... 0603 is the smallest I'll go, and there you are with quad packs smaller than the 0805s I prefer. I certainly don't use QFN, and am personally annoyed that you can't get the LTC6804 with pin spacing larger than 0.65 mm.

At NI we used parts down to 01005, and 0402 was the default choice... but they had their own manufacturing lines with mucho million dollar equipment.

 

[Mario]

That's a lot of small parts on a small PCB!
I can't remember the last time I specified an 0402 on anything... 0603 is the smallest I'll go, and there you are with quad packs smaller than the 0805s I prefer. I certainly don't use QFN, and am personally annoyed that you can't get the LTC6804 with pin spacing larger than 0.65 mm.

At NI we used parts down to 01005, and 0402 was the default choice... but they had their own manufacturing lines with mucho million dollar equipment.

Need small parts to get so much functionality on such a tiny board!

But besides that, the best chips these days are being made available only in smaller and smaller packages, so gotta get with the times.
I don't go smaller than 0402, you start getting tombstoning issues at that point without more careful design. Plus 0402 is about the smallest I want to hand-place and/or rework.
QFNs I've never really had problems with either, since the leads wrap around the side it makes inspection and rework easy. LGAs I have had issues with in the past. I've avoided using any BGAs thus far but likely will on some compact future projects.

Pick-and-place machines are so good these days, 0402s and little QFNs are nothing to them. Shouldn't raise the cost too much over larger components.

I used to prefer 0603, but after space constraints in a project forced me to go down to 0402, I found they're really not much harder to work with, and a whole lot smaller.

 

[mudder]

gotta get with the times.

You're saying this to the guy that's still using Windows 7, and whose primary workstation is from 2009... granted it has 96 GB of RAM and 24 cores, but it's still archaic. When I find a tool that works, I stick with it until it stops working.

I've avoided using any BGAs thus far but likely will on some compact future projects.

IMO you should continue avoiding BGAs forever. We used them all the time at NI, and all the time they were a headache. One of my buddies from Formlabs is at a new startup that sells 3D X-ray equipment to verify all the BGA pads are soldered correctly. We had a more primitive X-ray machine that all our BGA'd boards went through. But even if it's good on day 1, any flexure is going to lift balls off their pads.

Pick-and-place machines are so good these days, 0402s and little QFNs are nothing to them. Shouldn't raise the cost too much over larger components.

In my experience, 0603 is the smallest component a sub-$10k P&P can place well enough to not require any visual inspection prior to reflow. We use 0603 at DD, whereas everything on LiBCM is 0805, SOT23, or larger.

I used to prefer 0603, but after space constraints in a project forced me to go down to 0402, I found they're really not much harder to work with, and a whole lot smaller.

One drawback to 0402 is you can't run a standard 6 mil trace between the pads... not that I endorse that practice, but sometimes you've got to (FYI: LiBCM has zero instances of this cheat).

 

[Bull Dog]

For hand pick and place, I can reliably place and successfully reflow 0603 components. If I have to, I can also do 0402 components.

I've also recently had good success with 0.65 mm pitch DFN/QFNs.

I avoid 0.50 mm pitch components as those have given me issues in the past.

This is using leaded solder paste. Lead free solder is stuff of nightmares for what I do.

 

[Mario]

In my experience, 0603 is the smallest component a sub-$10k P&P can place well enough to not require any visual inspection prior to reflow. We use 0603 at DD, whereas everything on LiBCM is 0805, SOT23, or larger.

No board house I'm going to be getting these boards made at will be using $10k machines... sure, it could be cheaper with larger components, but like I've said before - Pegasus will be expensive anyway, so might as well spend the few extra dollars to make it really good. All electronics are getting smaller and smaller and P&P machines are getting better to match.

One drawback to 0402 is you can't run a standard 6 mil trace between the pads... not that I endorse that practice, but sometimes you've got to (FYI: LiBCM has zero instances of this cheat).

You can actually! This is a somewhat smaller 0402 footprint, but not by much. I put 6mil traces under them all the time, I wouldn't really call it a cheat. It's well within the fabrication capabilities of any board house.
(I use metric so this is a 0.15mm trace, 5.9mils, but close enough for illustration)

 

[relm50]

Hello everyone, greetings and happy new year from Canada!

I just stumbled across this thread and I am truly amazed! Such awesome work and I can't wait to see it come to fruition.

Thank you so much to everyone that linked the service manual PDFs and wiring diagrams, I have been struggling to find those.

I have an automatic 2000 Honda Civic (OBDIIb) and I am looking to swap my boring OEM Civic cluster for the ZE1 Insight cluster. Originally I just wanted to find the wiring diagrams so I can wire some basic functions to work like the rpm and km/h but now I am wondering if I can somehow retrofit the Pegasus module with an Insight cluster into my Civic. I know its kind of an odd project but any advice or insight would be appreciated. heh.

Thanks in advance!!!

 

[mudder]

Pegasus could do exactly as you've proposed, but it would take some firmware skills on your end.

 

[mudder]

@Mario: I think the Pegasus issue I get with LiBCM installed is a noise issue on H-Line. Peter thinks it's due to the longer 4 AWG current cables causing (even more) noise in the IMA bay. Note that LiBCM isn't connected to the H-Line in my car (although it supports it). Anyway, Peter was seeing 'hanging' issues with his OBDIIC&C in his LiBCM-equipped car. He 'fixed' them by:
-placing a 10 nF capacitor between H-Line and GND at the OBDIIC&C PCB.
-adding a 1 kOhm pulling from the H-Line to 5V at the OBDIIC&C PCB.

I suggest you add these provisions to your next PCB (if you haven't done so already).

 

[Mario]

@Mario: I think the Pegasus issue I get with LiBCM installed is a noise issue on H-Line. Peter thinks it's due to the longer 4 AWG current cables causing (even more) noise in the IMA bay. Note that LiBCM isn't connected to the H-Line in my car (although it supports it). Anyway, Peter was seeing 'hanging' issues with his OBDIIC&C in his LiBCM-equipped car. He 'fixed' them by:
-placing a 10 nF capacitor between H-Line and GND at the OBDIIC&C PCB.
-adding a 1 kOhm pulling from the H-Line to 5V at the OBDIIC&C PCB.

I suggest you add these provisions to your next PCB (if you haven't done so already).

Good investigation, thanks for the info! I will be sure to add some low-pass filtering on the K and H lines. They're also isolated to Pegasus, so that will provide additional protection.

Hello everyone, greetings and happy new year from Canada!

I just stumbled across this thread and I am truly amazed! Such awesome work and I can't wait to see it come to fruition.

Thank you so much to everyone that linked the service manual PDFs and wiring diagrams, I have been struggling to find those.

I have an automatic 2000 Honda Civic (OBDIIb) and I am looking to swap my boring OEM Civic cluster for the ZE1 Insight cluster. Originally I just wanted to find the wiring diagrams so I can wire some basic functions to work like the rpm and km/h but now I am wondering if I can somehow retrofit the Pegasus module with an Insight cluster into my Civic. I know its kind of an odd project but any advice or insight would be appreciated. heh.

Thanks in advance!!!

Thank you for your interest! Pegasus will eventually be able to do what you're asking. As mudder said, it might require some programming on your part. Pegasus can control the cluster display but any information you want to show on it will have to be fed in somehow. Likely you would have a microcontroller read the signals and send the data to Pegasus.
I would say it shouldn't be too difficult to do it without Pegasus if you are moderately proficient with Arduino and electronics. If you need help with driving or interpreting the signals into the cluster, I'd be happy to help.


Unfortunately, there's been no progress on Pegasus in several months since I've been in the process of looking for, buying, moving in to, and getting set up in my first house! I've been here for about 1.5 months now.
It's very nice, lots of room, lots of workshop space. Just been busy with unpacking still, getting myriad house-related chores done, etc. It's a big process.
Again, I won't promise any concrete timelines, only that Pegasus will get done eventually. I really can't believe it's been this long, though!
Look forward to seeing updates in 2022.

 

[mudder]

Congrats on your first home purchase! We've been in ours just over a year now. It's amazing not having to pay rent!

 

[Ecky]

Congrats, and welcome! It's always a huge upgrade over renting. I would not, however, count on having more free time.

 

[mudder]

I would not, however, count on having more free time.

Wait, am I supposed to be maintaining this thing? I thought everything that broke magically fixed itself. Don't I just call the landlor... oh, wait.

 

[Natalya]

Took a break from coding to work on a vectorized version of the instrument cluster's display. This is going to be used in the eventual Pegasus user manual for showing menus, what the screens look like, etc. without having to use photos.

This is all vector art, I can change the colors of the segments to "turn them on" or off and the entire thing can be scaled as large as you want without it getting pixellated. I'll be releasing the file for this eventually.

It's done in Adobe Illustrator, pretty much all by hand. I used my photos of the display and made them as straight as I could, then used that as a guide for making all the segments and whatnot. The bar graphs were made by putting one rectangle at each end, then using Illustrator's "blend" tool plus a circular path to fill in the rest. The seven-segment digits were traced by hand with the pen tool.
It's mostly just drawing different shapes that you can add together and subtract from each other to get the thing you want.

I was thinking about making a custom startup screen, actually. I could do it at this point, but I'm focusing on more important stuff right now!

Hey Mario, mind if I copy this work to use some of it on LiDisplay?

 

[Mario]

Here's the Illustrator file, and an SVG export! Let me know if anything seems wrong. I also have a python script that takes display data from Pegasus and creates a "screenshot" of it, if this seems helpful for making images you want then let me know. It would need to be modified to be useful to you.
Otherwise, it's pretty easy (though tedious) to open it in Illustrator, hide/show only the needed segments, then export it as an image.

You need to change the filetype of the "pdf" to .zip since they still don't allow us to upload zips anymore. :/

 

[Natalya]

Thanks Mario!

 

[Awakened]

Ive been reading over this thread for a bit now, id love to support this and purchase one whenever youre finished. My main goal is to be able to use the IMA gauges for something like an AFR. After reading through this post ive seen that youve taken it many steps further and are actually driving the digital display. lol. If you could somehow integrate a wideband o2 sensor input into the final result that would be really sick! Im not too good with the technical but i am proficient in basic wiring and advanced engine modification, i am after all swapping a K24/K20 frank with a s2k trans into a miata!

 

[walter.ybarra.sari]

I've got the display mapped out, which took absolutely forever. This simple demo actually has a lot of time behind it. Did you know there are 326 individually-controllable segments on the instrument cluster display?

Here's my mapping (I'm mostly just posting this right now because it looks impressive):

I'm going to work on writing functions to write letters and numbers to the display and set the bar graphs to whatever you want, and all that good stuff. At some point soon I'll move away from the Arduino I've been using and make a PCB that has a more powerful microcontroller on it. Then I'll work on reading data from the cluster!

HI, i have question about how i can use the battery meter in my cluster swap in a civic 96 00, measure the battery directly from my car to the cluster G1 insaght 2000

 

[mudder]

HI, i have question about how i can use the battery meter in my cluster swap in a civic 96 00, measure the battery directly from my car to the cluster G1 insaght 2000

Please verify the following:
1: Are you placing a G1 Honda Insight cluster into a Civic?
2: Is this a Civic Hybrid, or a regular Civic that you added a batter to?
3: What IMA system are you using? Is it an OEM Honda system? If so, is it Insight or Honda?

Depending on your answers to these questions, you'll either need:
A: Pegasus (this thread, but not yet released), or;
B: A METSCI man-in-the-middle. METSCI is the RS485 bus that tells the cluster which IMA info to display.

 

[walter.ybarra.sari]

Please verify the following:
1: Are you placing a G1 Honda Insight cluster into a Civic?
2: Is this a Civic Hybrid, or a regular Civic that you added a batter to?
3: What IMA system are you using? Is it an OEM Honda system? If so, is it Insight or Honda?

Depending on your answers to these questions, you'll either need:
A: Pegasus (this thread, but not yet released), or;
B: A METSCI man-in-the-middle. METSCI is the RS485 bus that tells the cluster which IMA info to display.

1 (YES)
2 (regular Civic )
3 (don't use ima. i lookup info on how to use the cluster part of the battery of the cluster maybe arduino?)



and I have another query, I am placing an (s2000 converter K-tuned) for the temperature of my 98 civic to the INSGHT cluster, but I don't know how to calculate the millivolts that I would need to mark the ECT of my car.

 

[Mario]

What causes the beeper in the stock instrument cluster to go off?
I can only think of two scenarios - a few beeps when your seatbelt isn't fastened, and a continuous beep when the headlights are left on after turning the car off. Have you heard the cluster beep in any other situation?

I want to make Pegasus be able to control the beeper in the cluster because it's nice and loud, it's already there, and it could be very useful to configure it to beep when certain parameter thresholds are reached, like a temperature warning. This would be one of the connections on the optional solder harness. However, Pegasus needs to not drive the beeper when the cluster is, so it's useful to know under what conditions the beeper is used. In practice I think it wouldn't be a big deal if both boards did drive the beeper at the same time, and it would likely be extremely rare anyway unless you frequently undo your seatbelt while driving!

And I am finally working on Pegasus again