It’s been a busy spring even with COVID going on. I tore down our old deck in March. Spent April and May rebuilding the new deck. Also redid a bedroom upstairs that included making new furniture for it as well. It’s the guest bedroom/my wife’s hobby room. Here are a couple of finished pics. At least I am make progress on something... the DSM has been rather stagnant lately...



I did finally get an 8” screen shipped to me. Got my money back for the other that never showed up at the beginning of March. Maybe someday it will randomly show up at the house. Who knows. So I still needed a way to mount this to the factory bezel. So I 3D printed some small tabs to go around the outside and get super glued to the back of the screen and side of the bezel. Figured this should work pretty well vs tape that will get very gooey in the heat. Time will tell. Not sure when I’ll get this in the car but hopefully soon. Should look really sharp compared to the 7” screen.

Got the 8” screen installed. Need to tidy up some of my wiring in the dash for all this but it looks and works great. Now that I have more room on the screen I’ll play around with the gauge setup some more. Maybe move some off my main screen so that one isn’t so busy.

Knocked out some serious housework man, the deck, room and hobby area look great!

Do love the way that tablet looks in the dash, very nice

Thank you. The wife is very happy and the new deck is so much better than what was there.

Finally had a chance to get the car out and washed for the first time this year. Earlier this year my hot start issues came back and I just parked it for a bit. Between other stuff going on and working from home because of COVID, the motivation and time wasn’t there. I got a starter blanket and a new starter about a month ago or so. Today was the first time testing it and it seems to have helped. Only time will tell. Hopefully it fixes the issue.

One thing I have just been living with for quite some time was the amperage draw of my radiator fan when it kicks on from a dead stop. It draws so much amperage when it kicks on that the car will actually stumble a few hundred rpms at idle. To combat this I would have the megasquirt add a few steps into the IAC valve a half a second before the fan would kick on. This would help a bit... but it’s a bandaid at best.

While doing some googling I came across some info that mid 2000’s ford cars had a solid state relay to control their radiator fans that takes a PWM signal. Basically this allows you to soft start the fan and ramp it up as coolant temp increases. The MS3x I run has plenty of PWM outputs and a few guys have already gotten this unit working just fine on other platforms. Luckily for me there are plenty of mid 00’s fords in a pick and pull near my job. I picked up two different versions but choose to go with the one that is known to work. Maybe I’ll play with the other one at a later date.

Basically you just have fused 12v power, ground and PWM signal going in and then leads to the fan coming out.



first step was to find a place to mount this. Ford had these mounted right to the fan shroud and based on the looks of it... it must get rather warm with the cooling fins and just the overall size and thickness of this aluminum housing. So I knew it had to be somewhere in the engine bay.... I just didn’t want it sticking out like a sore thumb bolted to the firewall or whatever.

a few years ago when I switched to this AFCO radiator I made up brackets to mount to the factory bolt location of the ac condenser mount on the upper radiator support. Already hanging off the driver side bracket is my Calan V3 catch can. On the other side I just so happen to have the perfect amount of room to mount this relay. Got another piece of flat stock, drilled mounting holes in it, welded nuts to the backside and welded it onto the existing bracket. Now that relay is tucked away nice and is still plenty easy to access. I still need to wire it up and get it working on the MS. I’ll post that up and my settings once I have it working.

Got the fan working on the new Ford PWM module. Works very well. Still need to test it on the road with the car running but it worked fine in the garage.

Credit to Malcolmv8 on YouTube for the info on this setup.

dsmcrzy said:

Still working on the Daycare every now and then. Did a few small things today that I have had for a while. Solid front roll stop and bumper mounts to delete the crash bar without the bumper sagging under the headlights.

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Thanks bro

Lets get an update

dsmcrzy said:

Got the 8” screen installed. Need to tidy up some of my wiring in the dash for all this but it looks and works great. Now that I have more room on the screen I’ll play around with the gauge setup some more. Maybe move some off my main screen so that one isn’t so busy.

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Ok - I'm curious now. What computer is driving these screens? what software is drawing the graphics?

Justin DuBois said:

Ok - I'm curious now. What computer is driving these screens? what software is drawing the graphics?

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Raspberry Pi4 is driving the screens. Using tunerstudio dash displays. The pi is hooked up to my megasquirt through a USB cable.

iNoise said:

Lets get an update

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Hahaha unfortunately no updates. I’ve been busy with kids and other projects. The DSM is still there. I still have parts on the shelf that need to be installed.

Been a minute. Car has been parked for the last few years in my shop in need of tires. Some family things, money things and focusing on other things (lots of things). Planning to get it back out this spring. I miss my fun car.

I really can appreciate the word and time in this car now that I own a 420a. Wish I got into the 420a platform sooner. Lol.

CrackedDSM said:

I really can appreciate the word and time in this car now that I own a 420a. Wish I got into the 420a platform sooner. Lol.

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Yeah…. I look back through my build thread. I can’t even begin to add up the time I have into this. It’s a fun hobby. Definitely worse things to waste time and money on.

Somewhat recently I began using ChatGPT for programming. One thing I don’t like at all is programming. I’ve had some various projects I was able to hammer my way though but the resulting product was never polished or full flushed out of errors. One thing AI is good at is programming.


So I used it for another project and then thought about the raspberry pi in my car. I had a few ideas of things I wanted to add. One thing being a way to download a log file without needed to copy and paste it onto a flash drive. The faster boot systems for the pi make flash drive mounting a bit clunky. So the solution was to make the pi an access point, then I could connect to its WiFi signal it emits on my phone and have it open up to the folder where the logs are stored. Then I can download it to my iCloud Drive on my phone and after disconnecting from the access point, the phone updates to iCloud and I can just download it on my laptop. It actually works pretty well. I can also switch from it being an access point to it connecting to the house WiFi.

The photos below shows what the link looks like on my phone. ChatGPT also made the ‘tooned’ style cartoon for my phone to make the bookmark look like an actual app. The other is what the webpage looks like. I can sort, download, delete and have a spot to upload files. It’s pretty incredible how easy this was to do with AI. The other app is my corn planter which is the other project I mentioned above where I first dabbled with ChatGPT.

Another AI use post… when I was attempting to get it to make that ‘tooned’ version of my car, it made this night time cartoon style of a photo I gave it. Came out really cool.

Well that was expensive! I have not driven this car in nearly 4 years. I forgot how much fun it really is. How crisp everything is compared to my daily (now a 2011 outlander sport 5 speed manual). The nimbleness and power too. Sure I’m not making crazy power with this thing (estimate around 300ish ball park) but it’s fun as hell to drive.

Jealous!

What is a DSM without needing something constantly? So I drove it to work the one day for a car show. Then saw I was leaking brake fluid near the brake fluid reservoir. Ordered some parts and got that fixed up today finally and bled the clutch and calipers. Been raining a ton here so I wasn’t exactly in a huge hurry.

It seemed like the brake line AN fitting wore into the reservoir. Not sure that was actually the case but I replaced everything I could in this area and redid the -3 AN line so it was a tad bit longer.

Also put a back seat back in the car so I can haul the kiddos around. Will be fun to see what they think of a car that actually has some personality vs the muted stuff we daily.