quattroworld

I got a chance to sit down with my buddy and poke through a guided tour of the digidash (my least favorite three syllables of CGT ownership) with my electrical hardware engineer and DeLorean accomplice, Matt.

Of 6 dash units, I have one functional dash, with 3 de-laminating LCDs. I am not sure what the top layer is, and I am assuming some sort of anti-glare. I may get brave and peel it at some point.



This one had a no-display issue with the center panel, so I had vehicle vitals available to me but no speed or odo. We dug in and found a faulty connection in the ribbon cable to the panel, and using some of the specialized tools my buddy had, we were able to get my speedo back. A clean set of halogens and the dash looked as good as it can for now!






Of my remaining stash, 3 are no-starts, and 2 are partially functional. They have swollen caps, ugly resistors and the amphenol connectors along the board that connect to the car appear to have been hand-soldered with solder that has corrosive flux when looking at it through a loop. We looked at the pads on some of the joints and they are pretty bad looking. Power supply is controlled via a voltage regulator that is another potential culprit. The neat thing is most of the component parts are still widely available. We are going to take a crack at reviving my original SB Digidash by re-componenting the board.

Other interesting things we are planning to try;
-Refreshing the contact strips on the glass displays. A big culprit of issues with display on these.
-Changing colors of diffusive panels behind LCDs should be easy and could change the color of the display to effectively whatever is available.
-LED Backlighting using PCB surface mount LCDs- No more dim panel. Would also attempt to incorporate pwm based dimmer with the lighting rheostat. Can change colors in this scenario too, but LED light doesn't diffuse like incandescent so it'd potentially invalidate the above.
-We ordered an amphenol female side connector to make a test jig for digis off the car and on a bench supply.

Another thing we worked on was swageing apart and relighting old cluster switches. I never had any idea that any of my switches were meant to be lit until I pulled my faulty hazards switch apart one day and looked at what was going on. We removed the old hosed bulbs and fit a modern red LED and resistor into my defrost switch to test. Single LED is good but the diffuser in the switches is a variable density; Matt would like to run a small batch of very tiny PCBs with surface mount LEDs to illuminate the face of the switch a bit better. We will likely run a board section worth of them on his next trip to china. Headlight and hazards to follow soon! I havent examined the digi-computer switch to see if it also was lit, but if it is we will tackle that as well.



HVAC panel is on my list too, I want my working cockpit back! When the DeLoreans are either behaved or broken enough to not want to work on (the latter currently) we turn our attention to other projects and its neat to sit down with someone with the requisite skills to work on these dashes.