Older Truck Computer?

[Bustnbig2]

I have an old Motorhome (1984). I am going through a "I wonder if it is possible" moment. I would like to figure out if there is a way to put a computer in that I can monitor engine, trans, and other items. This is my thinking. You are driving down the road with you dash mounted screen going. You glance at the dash and see that fuel, oil pres. and speedo gauges are normal but you wonder how the Tranny is doing. You press the gauges icon on the computer and you now have oil pressure, oil temp, cooling temp, tranny temp, and maybe even air to fuel pop up. Everything is good so you turn the GPS back on. The easy answer is to mount the gauges, but with a computer already installed, think of the possibilites. you could pay $20 for a web cam and instead of a $200 back up cam. You could upgrade to a holley fuel injection and do adjustments from the front seat. Someone could even build a USB air shock controller so you could change pressure on the fly. To the question: This is what I need. I need a USB devise that has inputs for oil pressure & temp, water temp, tach, etc; and a powersourve for a computer that is 12v. A program to monitor everything would be nice too. This is a motorhome so the rest is easy. What do you think?

[ReAX]

Because of the TFI, you are going to need to use a voltage or resistance based input device. For Automotive based applications, I would start here Universal Digital Tuning Products and Tuning Tools from Innovate Motorsports

For custom I'd go here Industrial Serial Communications - B&B Electronics

Innovate may even have software to make it all easy to use. Then you need to build a CarPC. The big thing in a CarPC is the DC-DC converter which provides clean and stable 12/5v. Small Foot print mother boards have come up since the original Citrix and VIA 133mHz, but you do have some other options if you have plenty of space. I would suggest a fairly powerful one with a big hard drive because once you get to playing with it, you'll want to wire in videos and music too. Then it's the OS. There are versions of linux which should load pretty quick, but you may run into software issues and have to run a NT based windows. 2k is the stripped down handy version, XP is 2k but eXtra Pretty, vista may not run on small foot prints very well. The last hitch is the touch screen display.

[angus]

Check out the forums at what may be the birthplace of car PCs...MP3Car.com - Your source for mobile computing solutions! - All Blog Entries someone there may have done it already.

Most off-the-shelf data acquisition devices (USB, ISA, PCI, PC/104) are intended for laboratory use and need some kind of signal conditioning and maybe isolation to survive the real world. I should give some thought to this, since I happen to have a stash of Labjack U12 USB boards left over from a project that didn't work out. And a larger stash of IOWarrior chips; they only have digital inputs, but maybe there's support for counters or something...

On the other hand, using a single microcontroller to do the acquisition and write to an alphanumeric LCD display is attractive too... it could have an isolated serial interface to allow a computer to get the data.