1980 Coupe - Turbo AWD v8 Swap

a91what said:

Nice wont fit in most builds but cant beat it for the price.

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Oh yeah, it's tucked in there for sure. There's no way to get it in a stock dash by any means

93reborn said:

I havent been on a forum in years but this build made me want to jump on stangnet. Cant wait to see it completely done!

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Aw thanks! I should have a bunch to share in a couple days.

I'll start with the biggest item, the dash. It really happened maybe a month ago? I'm losing track of time.



The dash needed to fit a big screen, some buttons and look good. I started with some steel round stock and the bottom brackets of the old dash.
Once I got a skeleton I added some foam on the front for form and started wrapping in felt.



I've seen custom car audio guys use fleece for lofting forms, I had felt and resin so I decided to give it a shot.

It worked! Now if your resin gets too hot you risk melting the foam out from under you but it was managable. On the lower half of the dash I primed the foam with Glidden Gripper (communly used in foam prop making).



A couple of rounds of filler and sanding and I got a shape I was happy with. Now to cover it...

Except, we're in the heat of lockdown and ordering anything will take forever, what can I get locally? Nothing. So lets try felt


To give this a chance at life I singed the fuzz off with a torch and then blasted it with uv resistant scotchgard. I think of it as a low low budget diy flocking.

As you can see from the pictures, I've got a fuse and relay panel behind a wood panel. The screen is nicely tucked into the dash and I have a nice set of switches for some direct controls of things like power circuits and start. Whats hiding under the dash took a bit more time than this...
To be continued:

Here is a big piece of the puzzle I've been working on, on and off , for the past couple of months:


A 16 channel relay board. To be controlled by an arduino, to be controlled by an arduino, to talk with yet another arduino.

Pictured here is one of the work in progress shells, final prints were in a nice black filament. With the NO and NC connections from the relays I could wire one relay for off/on and the other for low beam/high beam (although for headlights I am actually using these relays to switch bigger relays that will handle more current), each relay can handle 10A max. (I measured the current draw of each thing I intended to control with this make sure I was not going to melt my hard work). Not pictured is the power distribution circuit. The power supply is split up into 4 banks and for each channel there is a thermo fuse.

Currently I am directly controlling wipers, horn, blinkers,reverse light, and by way of bigger relays the headlights.

The main function of this board is to take in a command and switch a relay. It receives commands from a second arduino:

It seems in my rush to get this working I neglected to take a picture of the guts. Observe the small box temporarily taped onto the relay controller box.

This is the input control box. It talks to a third arduino with a radio transceiver as well as adding 7 channels of 5v I/O. The reverse switch is wired into one of the I/O's and with the radio transceiver I am reading input from the steering wheel, the third arduino.

This might have been the most amount of time I have spent on something.
I wanted buttons to press, a joy stick to navigate on the screen, compact knobs for the wipers and headlights.
And I did it.

All of the controls (minus the horn button) are mounted to a 1/8" sheet of aluminum bolted to the back of the wheel adapter, not sandwiched in between.

There are a lot of wire in this!


Lights and wipers are controlled by push button pots to allow them to also dim lights and activate the washer fluid. Along with the transceiver there is a hefty 1600mAh battery with an additional charging circuit.



The back red buttons are being used for blinkers, the black buttons will be used for menu/page switching on the dash.

Generally, the buttons on the front with be ok/cancel, media buttons etc, aside from the horn button whose purpose is most definitely a horn.
I haven't programmed these buttons yet, they will talk to the raspberry pi dash by way of the input controller's usb connection. It is almost assured that I will revise the input controller and add CANBUS communication too but that isn't needed at this moment.

And all of that combined,I was able to turn on and off my headlights while outside the car: https://photos.app.goo.gl/4o8AhDe7R7YgQkFK6

Noobz347 said:

Is it too much to ask for say...



Machine guns?

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So two-step?