Bring the instrument cluster to life

I saw before some years an instrument cluster of BMW E36 which worked with the game, and showed speed, the RPM, the water teperature and the fuel level. I said I want one. Now I made it myself with the cluster of my own car.

First I needed to know of the connector's pinout of the cluster. There is two connector. It calls M10-1 and M10-2.

There is some pins has same and some hase different function. I needed the power I/O and the signal inputs of Speedometer, Tachometer, Fuel and the Temperature.

But to know these I needed the diagram of the cluster. 

It has 3 parts of the diagram. Above you can see one of them, it is the Micom control IC in the cluster. This will use the signals from the PC. So that the Micom can able to process the data of the game I needed an extractor program which extract the data from the game, and a device with which I made a bridge between the cluster and PC, a device what makes signals from the extracted data.

The program called SimHub and the devices was an Arduino.

SimHub is versatile Windows software dedicated to improve your immersion in the various supported simulations through dashboards, leds, displays, bass shakers and many more features.

Arduino has a lot of type of boards and accessarys, but the IC is the determinant, the ATmega328.I had to programing the Arduino. The SimHub software was able to help in this process, but it based on the cluster of E36/46. So for a different cluster may needed some changes.

So after I programmed the Arduino, and connected the right pins of the cluster's connectors into the pins I programmed on Arduino, and I set everything in SimHub, configured the supported games, I got the result:

There is some instability, maybe there is some programming mistake, or that fact the car's instrument cluster made not for PC games. However I am satisfied with it. For now.

If you are interested, how I made this process step by step, follow the link in my TikTok video.