Steam-Punked 737 Engine Gauge Room Thermometer

[RayS]

Every once in awhile I need a diversion... a pet project. Something different and unique. Something to get my mind off simming, the endless troubleshooting and the "I hope nothing goes wrong today" that goes along with it.

It's not much to look at but I've successfully steam-punked a 737 engine gauge into a room thermometer. What you see here is a 737 N2 gauge out of a 737-200 (Or maybe a 727?), a Teensy micro-controller, and a temp/humidity sensor(the blue thing)

Took a few months to reverse-engineer the engine gauge input signal but finally got it. Next up is the humidity gauge since I have 2 of these engine gauges.

More work required to make this a display/conversation piece which I fully intend to do. Looking for some creative ideas here so if anyone has any input, please feel free to comment here.

Special thanks to Rob Archer for his assistance which was critical to getting this project off the ground!

By extension, this project could *easily* be modified into reading data from P3D or X-Plane to act as real engine gauges in a sim!

[kurt-olsson]

A w e s o m e!!!

[Ed]

Amazing work! Looks Great.  Unique and useful as well. Cant get one of those at Walmart

I've always wanted to install real gauges in my build but worried that interfacing them is beyond my skill sets.

[navymustang]

Ray - great job. It is unbelievable how much improved the fidelity of a sim is with real gauges. Like many here - I rarely do it because of the level of effort.

[xplanematt]

Looks sweet, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who wouldn't mind seeing the specs for the gauge signal, if you feel like sharing it.

There's nothing like real gauges.....yes the effort is (sometimes) immense, there is a lot of ongoing learning involved. OTOH, sometimes what you learn from one gauge transfers over to another gauge even though it uses a different signal. Such was the case with the oddball trim indicator instruments on my Sabreliner. At first I thought they would be a huge daunting task, until some brief experimentation revealed that they worked very similarly to an old Cessna flap gauge I'd done a couple years ago. After that, most of my work was just calibration stuff.

I'd definitely stick that gauge in a sim! You can always use a real OAT indicator, with its associated probe, if you need a nice thermometer.

Matt