Metering my car

Here I am, adding another meter to my car. This time, its a voltage meter plus some extras switches. Yeah, my car's electrical is going nuts, which I suspect could be due to the rusts. The voltage meter is for me to see how the car is doing but for all you know, it won't drop or rise as I expect. Maybe I should have gotten an ammeter with a 100A shunt instead. As for the switches, the red one is to monitor the brake lights while the white one is for reverse lights. Should any of the two not working, I will simply press the switch to bypass them manually.

To tell you the truth, I wanted to do the brake light switch ever since I got the car in the late 90's to simulate an emergency brake. But the switch would be those industrial mushroom types and p;aced in front of the dash in such a way that the driver behind cannot see I pressed it. He he he he.

Introducing one of my 'latest' tool, the metal nibbler.

Its the latest because I kept it for years and just got

to see it again. I asked around on how to cut metal

and Multifilla showed me a tool which is exactly

like mine. I am so stupid.

You cut a small hole for it to come through and then

you can start 'nibbling' the metal until you get the

shape that you need.

I wanted to put the special flip cover for the red switch

but there is not enough space. Too bad.

Since the meter is running on 5 volts, I can

just bolt on a 5v voltage regulator to the

metal casing which then acts as a big heatsink

Unfortunately, I can't find my heatsink thermal

transfer cream.

Looking from the side, there are no shorts. But I

am not taking any chances and so, I will use those

heatshrink tubing for the voltage regulators. And

when I need to wire up the switches later, it'll be

very messy in there.

At the same time, I decided to check my Tachometer

which has dimming problems. Since I do not have the

original specs, I used the next best component. So, it

now has a very bright display but cannot dim much.

There you go. As you can see, the two meters on the

right have spoilt displays and well, I am not going to

try repair them since I just opened them a few mins

ago and I suspect it has something to do with the

microprocessor IC. And I do not have the HEX files

to program them.