It's from a 'new' Mini, and I thought it looked rather nice and would suit the Roadster. Plus it was cheap at £16
The only slight issue is that it's controlled entirely from the CAN Bus in the Mini.
I like a challenge, so...
First thing I did was take the back off and see if I could figure out the pinout for the connector.
There's only 7 pins on it, and I quickly found the pins for GND, Battery, CAN-H, CAN-L, and the backlighting. That leaves two pins I don't know the funtion of, but I don't think I need them.
I cracked open my CAN interface and started sending random messages to see if I could get anything out of it. That was less than sucessful, so I did some googling.
Lucky for me some guy had recorded the CAN bus on his Mini, had a go at analysing it, and stuck his findings on the web. He had only identified a couple of the messages, but that was just the kick-start I needed, so I stuck my reverse engineering cap on and got to work.
A few hours later I could control the following functions from my laptop:
* Speed
* RPM
* All the tell-tale / warning lights
* Backlight intensity
* Position of the red-line
The only thing I can't do yet is get anything sensible displayed on the two little LCDs, but I'm working on that.
The next stage of this sub-project is to design a box that will sit in the car, monitor various signals, and generate the CAN messages for the cluster.
The schematic for that is complete, and the PCB layout is well underway.
Here's a screen shot of the test program I knocked up to talk to the cluster:
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