lambretta speedometer
April 16, 2008 – 2:51 pmIt’s been a few days since my last post because I’ve been elbow-deep in painting a spare bedroom and designing a top secret project for my Lambretta.
These are drawings of the faceplate and the printed circuit board for a digital speedometer for Series 3 Lambrettas. It will show speed, distance, RPM, and exhaust gas temperature. It also has a backlight, an ambient light sensor, a temperature sensor for compensating the readings from the thermocouple, and a big red LED for when something very bad is going on in your engine. For the display, I’m using one of the awesome surplus Nokia 3310 LCDs. They really make me happy.
Doing this design took a lot of work, mostly tedious things like looking up part numbers and drawing packages for parts that aren’t in an existing library, but on the whole it turned out to be much easier than I’d expected. I was afraid of having to get plastic parts fabricated for the housing, but the Lambretta speedometer design is so damned modular that I think I’ll be able to get away with just the PCB and a flat 1/8″ piece of laser cut acrylic for the faceplate. In fact, the whole thing turned out so cheap and simple that I don’t think it’s out of the question to make a limited production run of these things and still be able to sell them for a reasonable price.
Assuming it actually works, of course.
2 Responses to “lambretta speedometer”
Hi Jon
Picked this up via a google alert, is this real? Have you got a working model yet? Are you into Lambrettas? Are you in the UK?
Basically I’m really interested in this idea drop me an email
Cheers
By Anth on Apr 18, 2008
Hey! Let’s see… it’s real, I’m into Lambrettas, and I’m in the USA. I’m building this for my TS1 engined TV175 so that I don’t blow it up. I don’t have a working model yet; I just sent out all the orders for the parts earlier this week. It’ll be a month before I have everything in my hands, and then another couple of weeks or so to get the programming sorted out. Once that’s done I will start shopping the idea around and see what people want and what they’re willing to pay. Building a batch of these things to sell through normal channels would take a fair amount of cash and labor. At the very least, assuming this thing works, I will offer it on a limited build-to-order basis. I’ll post any updates here as they happen!
By jsco on Apr 18, 2008