Nick's Digital Shed

Following delivery of the new back-lit decals, a rather significant delivery arrived from PCB Cart with the Version 2 rear PCBs and additional two testing sets of remaining boards, giving me now 3 full sets of test boards and cables to play with. My focus therefore turned to testing the new rear PCB, which had a number of alterations to correct input routing and signal conditioning errors present in V1, preventing me from testing several features.  Along with the new boards, I has also designed a relatively simple testing board, bringing all of the simulated control signals from a messy breadboard full of jumper cables and loose earths to a proper board with nice clean signals. In my rush to design it I had made a couple of silly errors in the design that required a little bit of re-wiring of the underside but after a some time, I managed to successfully test all outputs as working correctly. The next phase was to test each function one by one, buy opening up my partially developed...

I spent a huge amount of time considering how to do this right - it's the bit I'm going to be looking at most when I drive the car, so I want it to look good and do the job it's meant to do, and ideally look like something that TVR could have made themselves. It took many iterations to arrive at a design I was happy with; the main issue being the small analogue dials at the bottom of the decal. The two motor hubs are offset from the centre, so if I were to draw an actual semi circle gauge around them, I would end up with an extended circle which looked very odd indeed. The solution was to angle each dash mark toward the real centrepoint of the circle rather than the motor hub, and to stretch the circle into an ellipse. The exact dimensions of the ellipse took forever to get right, so the dial "looks" like a circle as you feel it should be, but the needle doesn't look wrong travelling on a circular track and thus changing its distance to each mark on the dial. ...