anyone played with boxster gauge cluster? Options

[skeates]

Hey guys - I'm not sure if this is a subject that has been beaten to death before (I certainly wasn't able to find any threads on it), but has anyone here ever attempted to make use of the boxster or cousin 996 gauge clusters in a conversion? I was able to find a pin-out diagram for the boxster cluster which makes it look doable. Just curious if there was any fancy shmancy communications between the cluster and the ECU that would need to be worked around?

[skeates]

Ok, I bit the bullet and purchased a boxster gauge cluster off of evil-bay and for the last week or so I've been fiddling with it. The cluster (and surround) came out of a '97 Boxster, though anything up to the first part of '99 should be the same (has blue, white, and black plugs on the back).

First impressions is that the electrical aspect "should" be a cinch. After a few hours of fiddling with the cluster and a bread-board I was able to get it to turn on and start sorting out the signals. Even sort-of got the tach and speedo going. I say "sort-of" because all I have right now to generate a signal is an arduino board which can only produce a 5 V pulse-width signal. From what I can gather the cluster is expecting a 10 V signal, so the speedo only ever registered 48 MPH and the tach was a bit erratic. Next step is to swing by an electronics store to pick up an op-amp and some potentiometers so that I can simulate the different senders and test the fuel and coolant temp gauges. Also, this thing has an integrated outside air temp gauge that I'd like to get working (I'll provide some pics and video once things are set-up).

In the mean time I've been tackling fitment. Looking at the cluster, I'm not sure that it would fit without a custom dash-top. Since I was planning to get a bit crazy with my interior anyways I went ahead and made sure that my cluster came with the original surround and I'm experimenting with how to incorporate it into the dash. Here is some of my preliminary progress: