One of many largest upsides of open communications requirements corresponding to CAN or SPI is that a complete world of car hacking turns into out there, from easy initiatives like including sensors or computer systems to a automotive and even constructing an entire engine management unit from the bottom up. The reverse is true as effectively; sensors and gauges utilizing certainly one of these protocols might be faraway from a automotive and put to work in different initiatives. That’s the concept that [John] had when he set about utilizing a automobile’s dashboard as a info cluster for his home.
The core of the construct is an Astra GTE dashboard cluster, faraway from its host automobile, and wired to an Arduino-compatible board, on this case an ESP32. The code that [John] wrote bit-bangs an SPI bus and after some probing is ready to deal with all the instrument gauges on the dashboard. For his personal use at home, he’s additionally configured it to work with Home Assistant, the place every of the gauges is configured to symbolize one thing his home automation system is monitoring utilizing a bit masks to ship information to particular dials.
Whereas this particular gauge cluster has lots of vehicle-specific instrumentation and desires a legend or good reminiscence to tie right into a home automation system with out another modification, loads of automobile gauges are extra intuitive and so long as they’ve SPI they’d be excellent targets for builds that use this underlying software program. This mission takes an analogous tack and repurposes a couple of analog voltmeters for home automation, including a paper background to the meters to make them simpler to learn.