...WOW....


I think i see the 2004 game, to help place a door onto dans car, then to lift your robot off the ground using his 3 tier wooden spoiler for bonus points!

~Mike

heh, I saw that on eBay. Thank god the guy who posted it was joking (he extolls the virtues of the timex tachometer (a wall clock bolted onto the dashboard) and his body kit from the well known makers of garden supply (the five inch flowerbed trim around the bottem) and the chrome ex-trashcan that is now a spoiler.

heh.

search for type-R civic on eBay and you can laugh and laugh . . whats even funnier is that some people took him seriously and added scalding replies . . . hehehe!

AHHH
 

man

rice man rice. Dont get me started on it. My truck has a sticker that reads "anti-rice" across the windshield.

take a look.

http://www.cardomain.com/id/wurfelmann

yep

Neat idea.

My 2 cents:
-LEDs don't dim very well by just lowering the voltage. The correct way to dim a LED is by pulsing it with a signal similar to the PWM used for servo and motor control. Normally, a constant frequency signal is used and the duty cycle of the signal is varied to change the brightness. (Duty cycle is the percentage that a signal is "on". So a 50% duty cycle means that the PWM is "on" half of the time.) A good reference, but not too usable in your project is the datasheet for a LED dimming IC I've done some research over: http://www.semiconductors.philips.com/pip/PCA9532.html . The reason that this probably won't fit well with your application is that it communicates via the I2C bus, which requires a microcontroller or other processor to master the I2C communications. I would be surprised if you couldn't find some other LED dimmer out there somewhere... maybe even one that is voltage controlled.

-Based on my experience with alternators with tachometer outputs, I have a feeling that the tachometer works using a variable frequency, 50% duty cycle signal. A higher frequency correlates to a higher RPM. If you were to hook an LED directly up to the tachometer signal line, the LED would probably be at a constant brightness regardless of the RPM since the duty cycle of the signal never changes.

I can't think of an easy way to take a frequency modulated signal and convert it to a duty-cycle modulated signal. The best way may be to take the frequency modulated tachometer signal and convert it to a voltage, then take the voltage and convert it to a duty-cycle modulated signal (possibly using a LED dimmer IC).

Best of luck.
-Craig Morin

Just to let you know i havn't forgotten about this. I have just been busier than expected. I will make you a circuit, but i still need the signal reedings, or any other info on the signal would be good too.

I'll take the led pulsing thing into account. I knew this, but kinda forgot. Wow that made alot of sense.:p

Are you sure they would be illegal if you hid them in your tail/headlight compartments . . . ?

I mean, It would be constant brightness, just like running lights, but it would fade colors.

This is the one and only mod that makes having a fartpipe on your Civic not a castration offense. Don't add a spoiler, tho, that would still be baaaad.

This weekend I'll try and find the tachometer wire in my car and perhaps try and get/measure some info about the signal.

Problem's going to be finding the actual tachometer wire... I've found a few docs that give differing locations and wire colors, but we'll see how it goes.

I know what you mean and i am pretty sure, in all states, having the lights the colors of any emergency vehical visable from the outside of your vehical is illegal. i would look at your states website at the legality of it and i will post a link to new york below, and just sub-out "NY" from the address with your states abbriviation like "MA" for massachuettes and "NJ" for New Jersey and "NH" for New Hampshire and "PA" for pennsylvania and so on...


http://www.state.NY.us

theres the link above.

~Mike

What would be wrong with different colors, then?say . . . green and . . . um, purple or orange or something.

I know that orange flashers are legal in MO (see them all the time on contractor's pickups and stuff) soyou could have some fun.

It may be worth looking into. I think in the head/taillight compartments would be the best place for this setup. A real styling non-rice mod for a civic.

Technical Manuals are your friend
 

First: Be VERY careful if you do decide to open up the car dash. You will most likely have to remove the steering wheel. The pyrotechnics in the airbag do not respond well to static electricity, and touching the wrong wire, or probing the wrong wire with a DMM could set off the pyrotechnics. The pyros are no joke - I've heard stories of people taking a nap with their head on a steering wheel (parked), the car being clipped by someone else, and the airbag going off and killing the sleeper by snapping their neck. Airbag modules uses sodium azide, which is a shock sensitive explosive.

Helm Inc (www.helminc.com) carries the technical manual for Honda Cars. I drive a 2003 Accord EX, and borrowed the tech manual from the techs when I took her in for an oil change. The manual is about 2" thick, covers the location of every single nut and bolt in the car, along with how much torque to put on things, etc. If you want to take apart the dash *professionally* this is the manual to get, it will show you where to get at all those retaining clips, etc. (I plan to replace my 6 disc changer with a touch screen LCD and GPS, so I've been doing some research too, heh heh).

They also publish a wiring guide, which tells you what every wire does. From what I've seen, the pinouts are all there. Go to your local Honda dealer and talk to the shop guys, if you ask them nicely when they are not busy they'll usually let you flip through their manuals. Otherwise, it's like $45 for the electrical book and $75 for the mechanical book.

-=- Terence

Went back to the library today because the manual I got didn't have any wiring diagrams for what I was looking for. As it turns out, my library subscribes to this huge car repair database, and needless to say, I found diagrams for every possible circuit in my car as well as locations, etc. This was after the guy at the dealership pretentiously told me, "psah! The information's in my computer, but I don't give that stuff out." Moral of the story: dealers are in it for the money. Go to your library instead - you'll be surprised with what you find.

Anyways, after about two hours of searching, the database finally told me what I needed to know - the location of the tacho wire and the signal characteristics.

The database says the tachometer is 200 pulses per minute for every 100 rpm. Doesn't say the voltage, but the Vehicle Speed Sensor (speedometer) description says its pulsed signal is from an input of 5 volts. Might be the same, might not - I'm not sure.

Also, according to the wiring diagram, the tachometer signal wire already splits off to a "Test Tachometer Connector." Unfortunately, the way the database is set up, I wasn't able to find out where this test connector. It seems it would make the most sense to put this on the harness you plug the diagnostic computer into, but I didn't think of this while I was at the library, and so I didn't pull the wiring map for that connector up. Can anyone with experience with the car diagnostics system tell me if the computer plugs have a test tachometer lead to them?