Speedometer | Moto-Abruzzo

18/01/201524/01/2015

Stuff …. 6 months and 12 months on

A couple of anniversaries this week ….. firstly the dashboard. Yes a full 12 months since it was finished and put back into the Capo for the last time, resplendent with its new inlay to complement the electronic changes. The auto-dimming back lighting and split indicator repeaters have been absolute winners – I couldn’t go back to a standard board again without missing them. Moving the side-stand and low-fuel lights to Aprilia Caponord ETV1000 & Rally-Raid Voltmeter and re-located side-stand light on dashboard accommodate the twin indicator repeaters has had no impact, positive or negative. The voltmeter has been a different kettle of fish …. generally unused as the Sparkbight battery monitor handles voltage feedback when riding around – however it has proved a real benefit during start-up when the dashboard goes through its self-test phase. Now it’s become second nature to eye-ball the tacho needle to see what the battery voltage is pre-start. >12.6v and I know I should get a good kick from the battery!

Aprilia Caponord ETV1000 & Rally-Raid MCCruise control The second anniversary, although shorter at 6 months and a tad over 11K miles, is the MCCruise cruise control. After a rushed install (not clever) I knew I had a heavier throttle than pre-installation ….. this was purely down to throttle cable routing and nothing to do with the cruise control itself. It simply didn’t like being re-routed behind the radiator, so I gave up and relocated the CIU (cable interface unit) to a new location by the throttle bodies. Now everything works fine – a light throttle and a happy cruise control. It’s been 100% reliable and functional. As a demonstration of its finesse I ran the bike in 1st gear at 25mph and let the cruise control take over the (100 horsepower!) throttle – all I can say is WOW! I would never have believed that the system could have the sensitivity to operate the throttle with such precision, but it did – up hill, down dale – never an ounce of jerkiness. Ok I admit no one wants to ride around in 1st gear …. but as an experiment, it proved to me that MCCruise have indeed developed an absolutely fantastic piece of kit.

31/12/201424/01/2015

Dashboard repairs

Risto's Christmas card Yes I admit it here and now, I’m doing a U-turn – a full 180° – and NOT stopping dashboard repairs at the end of January 2015. Jeez …. You’re thinking, I wish this chap would make his mind up!!

Why the change of heart?

A couple of reasons actually …. Firstly, a few emails over the past couple of weeks that have made me reflect on the initial decision, secondly a Christmas card. Yep – a lowly piece of card with a simple season’s greetings from a Capo owner in Finland.

Risto sent his board over almost 18 months ago and by all accounts is happy with the work done and each Christmas he has sent a card. That connection across the continent would never have Aprilia Caponord ETV1000 & Rally-Raid dashboard repairs and upgrades, backlighting and voltmeter happened without the dashboard repair service. This year I opened the card and felt a twinge of regret, uneasiness, a sense that a decision I was making was the wrong one. The bottom line is that I would miss the emails/calls and involvement if I stopped something that I’ve been involved with since the beginning of unravelling the dashboard circuits.

Jan and I sat down and worked out some ways to free up a little more time and I’ve decided to put other projects on the back-burner for now. So I will not stop doing what I’ve done for almost two years ….. Give folks a grain of hope that a piece of their pride and joy can be repaired or upgraded. Sorry for the wobble, but hey, I’m only human.

And Risto ….. If you read this, just remember that opening your Christmas card changed the course of moto-abruzzo as he staggers into 2015. That’s pretty awesome when you think about it! 😀

06/12/201426/05/2016

Speedo sensor thoughts

Having chipped away through almost 1/3 of the parts I got last week, I started on the speedo sensor …… unfortunately t’was deader than a Dodo. That presented the perfect opportunity not only to measure it for posterity – but to strip it apart and see exactly how it was constructed. In this case as you can see from the photograph, the sensor (Honeywell 1GP7001) is completely buggered and split at the sensor head …. marks in the body suggest it may have been water damage.

All this leads to the idea of a re-usable speedo sensor, that could be re-orientated for use not only on the Capo, but also the RSV and Tuono. Here’s a MK1 idea using the same Honeywell sensor (about £15/€20) and a few nice stainless screws for that macho-Meccanno look! The idea is that if the sensor subsequently fails, you simply unscrew the case top and solder in a new sensor – bingo! Back in business in 10 minutes flat. 🙂

Aprilia Caponord ETV1000 Rally-Raid - 2005 rear wheel & swing arm So is it worthwhile following this up do you think, or should I resign it to – nice idea but ……?

And lastly, the chap in l’Aquila got back to me this week and offered me this pair of little beauties for €50 plus postage. 😀

Apparently the tyre is original and will require removal with dynamite or a thermic lance and the rim has a little scuff damage along the edge (about 5 o’clock in the pic), but I’m sure that can be taken out by someone more competent than I. I’ll have a nosey around the UK over winter and take the wheel back over with me in spring.

When the wheel arrives I’ll model it up, then look at various colour schemes that might (or might not!) complement the fudge/biscuit paint of the Raid. – not that I’ll ever get them done, more just a ‘what if I had dosh’ excercise unfortunately.

19/05/201426/05/2016

Finger on the pulse

While the wrist is healing nicely on light-duties and (thankfully) out of the heavy and restrictive cast, I’ve had a chance to play with the idea of an active cruise control for the Capo. An active system will adjust the throttle automatically to maintain a given speed even as the road rises and falls unlike a passive system which is nothing more than some form of throttle locking mechanism.

Arduino cruise control sketch The system I’m thinking about will, when all parameters are met (speed, revs etc) lock onto the chosen speed when the ‘Set’ button is pressed. The microcontroller will then look at the error between the chosen speed and actual speed and adjust the throttle as neccessary to try and maintain the error at zero – this is done using PID (proportional-integral-derivative) in the controller. If cruise is stopped (operation of brake or clutch) or the PID error goes beyond a pre-determined maximum (high gear on a steep hill for example) the requested speed is stored and can be re-activated by pressing the ‘Res’ume button. And while in cruise, the speed can be adjusted in 1Kmh increments by using the same two buttons, now working as ‘Acc’elerate and ‘Dec’elerate. That’s the theory anyway!

Inputs

Power – 12v on/off switch
‘Set/Acc’ & ‘Resume/Dec’ buttons – 12v
Front and rear brake light switches – 12v
Clutch lever switch – 12v
Speedometer signal from the dashboard (output on pin 14 of the 16-pin connector) -12v square wave 85% duty cycle frequency modulated
Tachometer signal -12v square wave 50% duty cycle frequency modulated.

Outputs

Two colour LED for power, cruise engaged & error codes – 5v
Motor drive signal – 5v PWM to motor control board.

To date the inputs and safety stuff has been written and from the tacho/speedo signals it’s calculating what gear the bike is in pretty quickly, but I’m sure it can be speeded up …… I just need to learn more programming! The operating parameters I’ve decided on are:

Cruise enabled between 50Kmh and 160Kmh (30mph – 100mph)
Cruise enabled between 2,750rpm and 6,000rpm but might change the lower limit to 3,250rpm in 6th gear
Cruise enabled in 4th, 5th and 6th gears only.

At the end of the day, I just want a system that will give my old worn out wrist a rest at motorway speeds on the run between Italy and the UK, taking into account the (very!) variable speed limits and ascents/decents especially through Switzerland. If it can do that I’ll be a very happy bunny indeed.

Of course this is all well and good, but I’ve got to get all the bits talking to each other first and make it robust enough for long-term and safe use on a motorbike ….. the problem is that in amongst all this enthusiasm my wrist still has a way of letting me know who’s really in control while swanning around on light duties!

11/02/201403/02/2016

New ‘Lockwood’ inlay fitted at last

On 4th February Jan came back home with a suitcase fair groaning with all manner of goodies. The most eagerly awaited though, was the pair of new inlays from Lockwood International Ltd. So first impressions?

Excellent! From the textured material to the bleed-free printing, from the fit to the light-transmission …. everything was exactly as I’d hoped. The first thing I did was pop one onto a waiting chassis/board and turn on the lighting – did the text and colour match the light channels? Again, perfectly. Now I could relax, prepare the new chassis and get ready to fit one permanently to the dashboard. To fix it in place I decided to use a general-purpose spray adhesive and did a trial run on an old chassis/inlay to make sure it would be suitable. Everything seemed fine and it was certainly good experience to do a dummy run.

Making sure the chassis was grease and dust free was essential, then masking off the light-channels, mounting pegs and anywhere else I didn’t want spray glue to go! A couple of thin coats of adhesive were applied and the inlay fitted 10 minutes later to allow time for the solvents to evaporate. Perfect! It was now ready to be fitted to the circuit board, but first a couple of modifications to the board/processor circuits.

First the eeprom file needed to be updated for the Futura speedo/tacho, then the code in the microcontroller needed updating for the different (voltmeter) needle calibration. At the same time a couple of modifications were made to the circuits based on insights I’d picked up about Arduino boards from the Internet, also the auto-dimming circuit was finally added for the variable back-lighting, a bit of tweaking with the code – and it was all ready to be refitted to the Capo.

So there I was …. on a wind-swept but warm Sunday morning, dashboard in hand and about to see the fruits of a few months work finally come together on the bike. No doubt the code for the auto-dimming will need fine-tuning, but that can be done without removing the dashboard again – and that’s the line in the sand, right there. Once fitted, I shouldn’t have to remove them again anytime soon …. and that’s a great feeling!

I think that about now would be a great time to pause and say thanks to a few folks who have helped me keep the momentum in this little project. Firstly Jan for her patience and for lugging stuff across the continent for me, to Andy (beasthonda) for bouncing ideas around with me and his interest in the project, to Arvdee in the USA without who’s generous donation of a Futura inlay I wouldn’t have had a template. Last but not least, Clive from Lockwood International for putting the proverbial icing on the cake – thank you all!!!! 😀

23/01/201406/02/2014

Moving along nicely

Just got this photo from Clive over at Lockwood International in the UK, the nice folks who have made my new inlays for the Caponord dashboard. I’ll write more when they arrive …… I can’t wait!!

RST Futura based inlay with voltmeter and left/right indicator repeaters

Back-lit voltmeter within the tachometer
Left & Right indicator repeaters
Red-line raised to 10,000rpm to match ECU setting
Side-stand lamp is now where the unused ABS lamp was
Funky Aprilia lion instead of boring old ‘aprilia’ text
‘magneti marelli’ logo removed …. well they didn’t design this one!

19/10/201303/02/2016

Dashboard upgrades

Evening folks, I thought I’d share this with you as the nights start to draw in and riding gives way to winter tinkering.

I mentioned over on the dashboard page about the upgrades hopefully working by spring next year. Well some of them have come along in leaps and bounds, so I took a snippet of video so you can see a dashboard work-in-progress strutting it’s stuff on the workbench. OK, I know that there’s no voltmeter markings on the inlay yet, just use your imagination for now! It’s actually showing 12.4v ……….

Now while I’m waiting for an oscilloscope to miraculously appear, I’ll leave the board bench testing for a while to see if the code or controller breaks, then fingers crossed, it’s on to the auto-dimming back lighting instead of the three fixed settings of useless, mostly useless and acceptable.

23/11/201225/01/2021

A little light circuit training

Aprilia Caponord ETV1000 Rally-Raid - Dashboard large LCD panel On a previous post I mentioned a visit by Mike081. During his stay I said that I’d like to get hold of another instrument panel at some point, so I could look into the circuit and programming in more detail. It just so happened Mike had a board lying around and he promised to sent it over. Well, true to his word, a Mk2 Caponord board was sat on the post-box when I got back home the other day. Cheers Mike!

First, I made a stand to support the little beauty while I prodded and poked around with my trusty multimeter. The next job was to try and fix it! The board had a couple of problems, a high resistance track and faulty regulator but nothing too taxing. Next up, I photographed the front (high resolution pic here) and back, then imported them into AutoCAD and started the tedious task of unravelling the tracks and components (click on pic).

Next up, the EEPROM. The little memory chip that contains settings and data relevant to the running of the board and recording of mileage and trip.

Two AF1 forum members – Michele (MCR) and Andy (Beasthonda) have been forefront in unravelling the data on the chip and how it alters the way the board works. The bottom line is that instrument panels from both the Caponord and Futura can now be reprogrammed in various ways and used on either bike. This also means that the ability to safely recover boards that have reset to factory default is now possible.

I’d like to thank both Andy and Michele for including me in the email exchange and for sending data and documents so I can better understand the particular settings for each bike – Cheers gents, you’re the best!

So this week I’ve experimented with the alternative settings and sure enough my little board has changed from Caponord to Futura and back and dabbled in metric and imperial measurements and even been a hybrid – Caponord with Futura LCD display and Speedo/Tacho calibration.

Aprilia Caponord ETV1000 Rally-Raid - dashboard