Tue Aug 16, 2011 5:35 pm
I saw one of these at the BayLeaf meeting this past Saturday in Redwood City, and it looks pretty slick.
After having seen it, I have a few suggestions (sorry if this is the wrong thread):
- It took me a long long time to find any pictures (online) of what this thing looks like. For the benefit of those who haven't seen one, I would suggest adding a photo to the web site with the order and assembly information, so people can see what they're buying.
- The display can be very difficult to read depending on placement and ambient light. I suspect that adding a red filter (plastic, gel, or whatever they're called) over the display would likely improve help improve readability.
- It's great to see a percentage, which roughly translates to "city miles". It might be nice to also calculate "highway miles" and display both, in a form that shows the "low to high" miles remaining, like "hh:cc", for example: 70:99 or 35:50. I believe this information would be much more useful since it provides a basic "range" of miles remaining, and eliminates the guesswork involved in trying to imagine what the dashboard "guessometer" is currently displaying (city vs. highway, as it tends to fluctuate between the two based on your recent driving).
- I'm also curious whether one of the buttons might (some day, after a firmware update) be used to display tire pressure info. If the LEDs are addressable (rather than just displaying numbers), then you could light up two "corner" segments of one digit, corresponding to the tire location, and then display the tire pressure in the right two digits.
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