A while ago I decided that I was sick of pulling my Empeg out and putting it in the trunk every time I left my car (almost always with the top down). I'm usually not going anywhere I can take the player with me, and besides being inconvenient putting shiny boxes in the trunk out in public draws unneeded attention, and even if I'm going 2 miles when I get back I still have to get it out or it might go flying in the trunk and break a nipple... So I figured I'd get a serial VFD, put 7 buttons somewhere, install them in the car and put the sled in the trunk.
Well it's not quite finished yet and it's gotten a lot more complicated than originally planned, but my Empeg is currently out of commission while I await a replacement hard drive so nothing is going to be happening for a while and I know some people were waiting for more details.
Just about everything is installed, I just need to test the VFD before putting the car back together. The software still needs lots of work, but it basically works and I briefly used the joystick to control it in the trunk before the drive died.
First I ran power, audio, and serial cables to the trunk. I didn't want to hack up my Empeg harness or the ISO connector I soldered onto my HU, so I went searching for male and female ISO ends. Fry's didn't sell them, but their installation department happened to have them from hacking off other people's stuff and just gave them to me. I spliced those in on both ends, then cut a piece of MDF to attach the sled to the car, with zip ties (simple but effective...).
The display is a 256x64 Noritake Serial VFD, 3900 series. It's mounted (more zip ties..) to an OEM Mazda storage cubby-thing that I cut the back off of so the screen could be mounted as deep as possible without clipping. Previously I hacked up my original storage cubby to fit in and hide the sled, so I had to go get a new one ($15). I still need to get a smoke filter to put in front of the display.. The idea is to make it all look nice and "nothing out of the ordinary to steal here" when not running. I picked this display because it's DIN-sized and has room for 4 Empeg screens worth of data, or one really big pixel doubled Empeg-sized screen. Extra real estate to play with sounded like a good idea.. unfortunately the serial is only 38,400bps, so non-trivial drawing techniques are needed to get decent framerates outside of the basic Track/Now & Next Info modes.
The joystick is from Grayhill.. It has all 7 of the empeg face's actions all in one axis.. I've hacked up my cig lighter to try and make it look like it's still a cig lighter there.. it looks sort of crappy though, I'll probably find a better knob. The joystick requires various electronic bits to get it's signal to the Empeg (most of the board, the section with the giant coil is a 5v regulator), and eventually the Basic Stamp outputs 'L' for left being pushed, 'l' when released, etc.
I relocated the airbag disable switch I never use and Dremeled out a piece of MDF in the shape of the hole and filled it with 9 switches (so much for looking normal).. One (the white one) is power for the board, one (the left one) drives a relay for my garage and gate openers, and the other 7 go to the Basic Stamp and send keys to the Empeg. They don't do anything yet, but will be programmed to do..something. Probably 2 buttons to control the VFD UI, since it will eventually do other stuff (multiple panels of info), and since I don't have an IR repeater (yet) the other 5 will do stuff like Info+, Visual+, etc.
The Basic Stamp has 2 i/o pins left that I'm going to attempt to connect the speedo and tach signal lines to and try to do something useful (okay, fine, useless but cool) with.
The software currently handles the 7 basic Empeg buttons, and has a few simple drawing algorithms. I decided the only way I would find time to improve it was if I had to use it every time I was in the car.
So, pictures are
here. This one (last on the page) shows how everything looks from where my head goes:
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