Hijack the Dimmer?

Mark, I've been wondering about this for quite some time. I'm sure its possible, but not for me to attempt! When you have your dimmer wire hooked up, and turn your lights on, it switches the deck into "night" mode. What i would LOVE to see is when i move the dimmer control on my car's interior lights, for it to control the deck. I'm sure almost every car maker has different signals coming out of the dimmer line, but on earlier VW's the dimmer just controls the voltage of the line. Say for example with dimmer set to max the line is at 14v, and min the line is at around 2v.

Could you setup a config option that would enable the deck to control the display brightness based on how much voltage is coming out of the dimmer wire? Maybe also another setting for an offset for each volt lost or gained on the wire +/- 10%, or 15%, etc from the dimmer.

Nope. The dimmer line is a digital line - on or off.

Newer cars use PWM on the line, so in theory we could measure the duty cycle and vary the dimmer level appropriately.

What you want *might* eventually be possible with the new tune kit coming out. I'm not sure whether Patrick managed to include any analog inputs in the end or not. I know he was looking at including some additional I/O at some point.

So basically what your saying is the dimmer input on the empeg is can only be read as either on or off. And there is no possibility of monitoring the voltage input of that input. Is this the correct interpretation of your post? Or am I completely wrong?

That is correct.

I didn't include analog inputs on the current kit, since it would have broken existing functionality. The expansion board will have some, though.

pca

Expansion boards, I like the sound of this!