I am building a VW beetle (loosely) based sand rail and am going to use a touchscreen to display gauge info and if possible control the switching of non critical systems (wiper, aux lighting, seat heaters, etc). I thought I was going to have to get the entire interface custom made until I found RealDash. It is exactly what I was looking for but didn’t know existed. Because the engine I’m using is a 73 carb’s air cooled beetle engine I obviously don’t have and OBD2 port or any computer to pull data from. My original plan was to use an Arduino mega for engine input and switch output and a Raspberry Pi to connect everything. From what I’ve read it looks like I can do away with the Pi entirely and just run a USB connection to a tablet. What I haven’t been able to find is any info on the programming needed to make it all work. I’ve also haven’t found any info on how to add buttons to RealDash so I can control external devices through the Arduino and a relay board. Any links or help you can give me will be much appreciated. Finding RealDash saved me a ton of time and energy and is probably a better interface than I would have come up with anyway.
For ready made solution to control all electronics of your car from RealDash, contact SPLeinonen (www.spleinonen.com) for their PDSX-1 and DashBox systems.
To build everything from scratch, start by experimenting with our RealDash CAN protocol and Arduino examples:
https://github.com/janimm/RealDash-extras
Do you have any links with more info aside from just the code to make it work? I’ve got someone doing the coding and will pass everything along to him. I want to make sure I understand the hardware/wiring side of things.
No, sorry. We do software only.
For connecting your car to Arduino check out this website:
For connecting Arduino to RealDash, I suggest you use an Android head unit instead of a tablet, after 4 or 5 tablets I could not get to mount, charge, talk the way I liked, I went this route and it is much easier. I mounted one of these in place of the gauge cluster:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SLJM53R/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
You just need a USB to TTL cable from the unit to the Arduino
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TXVRQ7V/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1