Add display screen to Vespa PX

[Hyper]

hello to all,not sure if you can help or if this is the right place but il give it a whirl and see what happens

I'm in the process of building a vespa px and would like to put a screen in the tool box door,,,i would like the screen to display engine temp,exhaust temp,and battery/fault finding data and rpm

and if possible a screen saver type mode which moves to the engine rpm,,,the only way i can explian my idea is the light on the front of kit in nightrider??

the vespa will have a small 12v battery,,I'm not sure if another battery would be needed as there may be times when i want to look at running data when the engine is off


the tool box would take a 10x5 screen with plenty of room behind for whatever is needed to create this idea,,,if anyone can help or send me in the right direction because electrics boggle me,plug and play would be nice but if i get an idea on what to buy ive got one or two friends that can help

cheers

 

[Hyper]

ive been told about a small pc device called a raspberry pi,,not sure if this could be used to run some kind of program to display what im after?

 

[Gryd3]

ive been told about a small pc device called a raspberry pi,,not sure if this could be used to run some kind of program to display what im after?

depends on the horsepower you want the device to have.
The raspberry device you are talking about has some general purpose inputs and outputs that you can connect to sensors, as well as video output...
The downside is that you will need to program your display to run in linux, or you will need to program it 'bare-metal' which is more of an 'experts' approach.

There are other devices like the Raspberry Pi, that can be used as well.

You can also buy windows compatible motherboards in some pretty small form factors.

What kind of sensors will you be using?

 

[Hyper]

hello Gryd3

when you say horsepower,,,do you mean the bhp of the vespa engine or the power running to the pc/screen?

you can buy rpm/tacho and temp gauges for scooters which have wires that connect to the sparkplug,,,,,these wires go straight into a small display,,,,,how would you go about connecting these upto a laptop or raspberry pi???


when people take there cars to a dyno,,,,the operator plugs his laptop in to the ecu and has a program showing speeds,rpm,fuel etc

 

[Gryd3]

hello Gryd3

when you say horsepower,,,do you mean the bhp of the vespa engine or the power running to the pc/screen?

Haha, sorry that was bad on my part. I meant to ask how powerful you want the computer to be.
Power consumption of the screen is of no concern to whatever device you want to display with, as they are merely sending signals on what to show.
Usually the computers used at Dynos plug into the service port on many vehicles and support various CAN communication profiles (OBD / OBD-II).
You can do this as well with a PI, but you will NEED additional hardware to convert the CAN messages to a signal that the Raspberry PI can understand.
Alternatively, if you understand how the additional sensors operate that you with to use, you can find a way to have the PI read them directly.

The kicker here though, is that using the CAN bus will allow you to pull much more information out. It will be a central point where you can gather all of your info.
This is the ideal way of doing it, but will require a bit of tinkering to get it to connect to your machine.

I can't help with the CAN communication unfortunately. I understand the concepts, but the closest I have come to dealing with it was using an OBD to Bluetooth adaptor for my phone to view sensor data.