Digital Dashboard for my 1992 Lincoln Town Car!
Recently the twists and turns of life left me in a fairly rural part of the US with very little money and no car. I needed a car so I ended up buying a really cheap 1992 Lincoln Town Car. To my surprise, I found that I actually liked this car quite a bit and decided to slowly work at fixing the many problems that come with such an ancient somewhat neglected automobile... most of that stuff isn't really of much interest to The World, but there is one thing...
Turned out that the odometer doesn't work on the car. I got lucky and managed to find the Service Manual and Electrical Manual for this exact model of car on eBay almost for free so I grabbed them and they have been helpful in understanding this beast as I try to figure out various problems.
The troubleshooting procedure for the odometer informed me that the whole assembly needs to be replaced. It isn't so easy to find those and about the best I can do right now is around $100 on eBay for one torn out of a junked car, and it isn't easy to figure out exactly what condition it is in.
I started to think about alternatives... new cars these days come with very interesting dashboards. It's a bit of an anachronism but I think it would be cool to fit this car with a homemade version of something like that -- modern digitally-presented information retrofitted into an staid old car. I can always change it around to make it fit the style of the interior after it is functional...
Seems to me like it should be a moderately interesting hobby project for the winter months. I'll also get to play with some stuff I would like to learn a little more about.
In case other people want to do something similar in the future, I figured I would document the effort (and at an appropriate time make the source files available on GitHub).
Turned out that the odometer doesn't work on the car. I got lucky and managed to find the Service Manual and Electrical Manual for this exact model of car on eBay almost for free so I grabbed them and they have been helpful in understanding this beast as I try to figure out various problems.
The troubleshooting procedure for the odometer informed me that the whole assembly needs to be replaced. It isn't so easy to find those and about the best I can do right now is around $100 on eBay for one torn out of a junked car, and it isn't easy to figure out exactly what condition it is in.
I started to think about alternatives... new cars these days come with very interesting dashboards. It's a bit of an anachronism but I think it would be cool to fit this car with a homemade version of something like that -- modern digitally-presented information retrofitted into an staid old car. I can always change it around to make it fit the style of the interior after it is functional...
Seems to me like it should be a moderately interesting hobby project for the winter months. I'll also get to play with some stuff I would like to learn a little more about.
In case other people want to do something similar in the future, I figured I would document the effort (and at an appropriate time make the source files available on GitHub).
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