Like most car guys, I have collected various bits, pieces, signs and other things for the Mancave/Garage.
But the one thing that I am really enthusiastic about is this HQ Statesman front end that I have hanging on the wall.
I purchased a Nosecone, Radiator Core Support, Grilles, Headlight Buckets, and Headlight surrounds from a guy up on the Sunshine Coast.
I had this idea in my head to have a complete front end hanging on the wall, but then I got carried away, and it evolved into much more.
After cleaning it up, painting the Nosecone in Etch Primer, and the Radiator Core Support in Satin Black, cleaning up the Grilles and fitting them to the Nosecone, and sourcing some Low and High Sealed Beams from Rare Spares, I thought, “wouldn’t it be great if the lights worked and lit up”?
And then I thought, “wouldn’t it be awesome if I could do that with a Remote Control”?
And then I got really carried away and thought, “what about adding the sound of a V8 engine starting up too”?
But I wasn’t finished yet. I’ve just now added a couple of timing circuits that switch the Low Beam Headlights on a few seconds after pressing the button, followed by the High Beam Headlights a few seconds after that.
And after all that, this was the result.
For those that might be interested, this is the Circuit Diagram, including the Parts I used to achieve the Remote Switching of the Headlights including the delay circuit boards.
The sound was added using a Programmable MP3 Player (not shown).
This is another little project I made.
It started off with the intent of being just a simple use of an old Distributor Cap to display LED’s turning on and off sequentially to represent spark out to each cylinder of a V8 engine. But then I thought, why don’t I add a 7-segment display to show the Firing Order of a Holden V8? But now I was on a roll. What about adding Knight Rider lights? That ended up resulting in not only the Knight Rider effect, but a raft of other programmable LED sequences. But I wasn’t finished yet. Why not add the sound of a V8 starting and idling, and while I’m at it, add the song, “Football, Meat Pies, Kangaroos and Holden Cars? And after all that, this was the end result.
For those that are technically minded, and are wondering how all this was done, well this is how.
First, I used an Arduino Uno microcontroller board, and programmed it with code that turns the LED’s on and off sequentially on the Distributor Cap at a 1 second interval. The sounds that you hear were uploaded to a programmable MP3 player, of a type that you find in Greeting Cards that play music when you open them. I also used one of these for the Nosecone above. I then uploaded the sounds that I wanted to the MP3 Player. You can cycle through those sounds by pressing a button. The Knight Rider lights, (and other effects), are achieved by using a board specifically built to do that. Pressing a different button lets you cycle through the different options. And finally (the hardest part), was building a logic circuit using three chips, with four 2 input OR Gates that convert a decimal input, in this case 1 through 8, into Binary, 0001 to 1000, and feeding that into a Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) chip, that converts BCD into the correct outputs to drive a 7-segment display. To turn power on and off via the “Engine Start” button, I had to build a power latching circuit. That’s because the Engine Start button is a momentary action switch.
And there you have it.
Also in the classification of “Mancave Garage Art”, are the following:
