This cluster arrived from ebay yesterday afternoon:
It's from a 'new' Mini, and I thought it looked rather nice and would suit the Roadster. Plus it was cheap at £16
The only slight issue is that it's controlled entirely from the CAN Bus in the Mini.
I like a challenge, so...
First thing I did was take the back off and see if I could figure out the pinout for the connector.
There's only 7 pins on it, and I quickly found the pins for GND, Battery, CAN-H, CAN-L, and the backlighting. That leaves two pins I don't know the funtion of, but I don't think I need them.
I cracked open my CAN interface and started sending random messages to see if I could get anything out of it. That was less than sucessful, so I did some googling.
Lucky for me some guy had recorded the CAN bus on his Mini, had a go at analysing it, and stuck his findings on the web. He had only identified a couple of the messages, but that was just the kick-start I needed, so I stuck my reverse engineering cap on and got to work.
A few hours later and I can now control the following functions from my laptop:
* Speed
* RPM
* All the tell-tale / warning lights
* Backlight intensity
* Position of the red-line
The only thing I can't do yet is get anything sensible displayed on the two little LCDs, but I'm working on that.
The next stage of this sub-project as it were is to design a box that will sit in the car, monitor various signals, and generate the CAN messages for the cluster. That'll give me something to do in my lunchtimes at work
Here's a screen shot of the program I knocked up to talk to the cluster:
And there's a little vid of it in action
here (very poor quality I'm afraid).