It’s been a while since I have posted on the blog. The Driven Telemetry and Control project I am working on is taking up a lot of my time (now I have taken the role as Electrical team lead) and as such I have spent almost no time on the eCumbent or the Tandem.

Fortunately I found some time this evening to finally complete this little project so thought I best update weChook before my time is further absorbed. A friend of mine, Adam, has recently purchased a rally prep’d MG ZR complete with a sequential gearbox. Though the box seems fantastic and allows him to shift quickly through the gears he currently has no way of knowing which gear he is in, since the lever is a simple push pull type.This quick project will hopefully help him with the confusion. A simple up down counter implemented using an MSP430G2211 increments and decrements through the use of 2 micro switches. These will be fixed at the base of the gear lever. The output is handled by a 7 segment LED display (blue, of course) which shows the current gear (Gears: n, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Since joining Jaguar Land Rover and discovering the beauty of ‘surprise and delight’ features I have incorporated a gimmick in to this project: it spells out the drivers name at initialization.I haven’t bothered building a PCB for this design as it has so few components. The MSP430 is just soldered to the back of the LED and other components glued around. Adam plans to pot the indicator when we are fully happy with it’s operation anyway.

I have made the following available for this project: Source, Schematic