I had a few questions about the dash recently, so thought this would be a decent time in the thread to share that info in case anyone else is considering this sort of tech in their car.
First up I spent a bit of time last night on the TC telltale issue, it turns out my config was fine - I just wasn’t switching TC off properly on the car. The push and hold button in the car does not disable TC, but it ‘activates’ the adjustment knob, then you can spin the knob fully clockwise to disable TC (at which point the telltale correctly lights up), spin fully counter clockwise for minimum slip and then have a granular adjustment range between the two extremes.
Unfortunately with my car being an early model, the canbus is very limited and the only data sent from the ECU is whether the TC is on or off, or intervening. Apparently on the newer blackdash cars it also sends a slip % target to be displayed on the dash, which would have been cool - but I can add all that later if/when my EMU Black ECU goes in.
As for the dash itself, it’s an ECUMaster ADU5. They do a 7" version but it’s just too big to comfortably fit inside a Lotus dash shroud. In your hand, it feels tiny - but it does suit the Lotus interior scale pretty well IMO.
The 6 big lights either side of the dash are fully configurable and you can use them for whatever you want. I use two of them for indicators, one to flash up when an alarm is raised, one to flash up when TC intervenes (in addition to the telltale on the dash) and I have one light up blue when the coolant and oil are below the threshold I’ve set for “driving hard”, stuff like that.
The shift lights are again fully configurable, you can either have them going left to right, right to left or in from the sides/out from the middle. I’ve gone for F1 inspired colour coding of Green-Red-Blue left to right.
The dashboards are one of the cheaper ones on the market, but they come with literally no config on them and you have to build up everything yourself. They’re certainly not plug and play! For me though, that’s the fun bit. I’ve spent hours and hours of sofa time on a night tweaking my dash layouts, alarm logics, etc. I love it. The base price also excludes wiring, addons such as GPS module and other bits that make the other PnP dash kits feel like better value for money if you just want to get up and running ASAP.
Oh, you also need to buy some sort of USB to CAN adapter, ECUMaster make one - but it’s still more addon cost to consider if you’re planning one into your project.
Once you have the client installed and you’re connected, you can start making stuff. It’s very, very flexible and generally the quality of the aesthetic is limited only by your own imagination. There are some amazing examples out in the community, but over time I’ve stripped out ‘fluff’ from mine and made them very plain and functional, whilst still in keeping with the car. My favourite dash design of all time is the stack “triangle” dash which gives an idea for where I’m at in terms of function vs form!
My ‘Road’ Dash layout currently looks like this. I’ve alternated between having a digital bar type RPM bar and an analogue style gauge, still not sure what I prefer.
The bottom half is loosely inspired by the later Lotus dash layouts, with their dayglo LCD panel in the corner and warning lights across the bottom. All of the greyed out lights are functional, and light up properly when needed. The top right one is a custom one I made to light up blue when my gearbox cooler was live on my Exige. (cooler hasn’t been migrated to the 2-11 yet).
The speed, mileage, RPM, all data is just in a demo mode for these screenshots.
The ‘Race’ dash layout is like this:
Over the months I’ve stripped out all sorts of data that I just don’t care about when lapping on track. The lap timing stuff across the bottom is of course not legal for UK trackdays so I wouldn’t dream of having it enabled at such events, but it’s very useful for the odd occasion I do something competitively.
I have two stages of warning for if some data goes out of bounds, if it goes “softly” out of bounds, the box lights up red:
And if it goes way out of bounds, the dash warning triggers which also lights up some of the LEDs. Very hard to miss.
In terms of stuff like fuel, the fuel pump icon lights up red when I’m <20% and stuff like that. The Oil Pressure warnings are dynamic based on RPM too, so I won’t get a warning at 1bar of oil pressure if the car is at idle, but at 5k RPM if it dips below 3 bar (for example) it will flash up.
The next screen I have is a diagnostics screen. This is still carry over from the Exige so some of these rows are not currently available from the OEM ECU in the 211.
…and then finally, again for events only I can see a lap time summary of the session.
I browse through these pages sequentially using what used to be the trip reset button on the steering cowl. As far as I’m aware there’s no practical upper limit of screens you can have or make, which is pretty cool. If I add more buttons in the future, you can also handle page navigation differently - such as pressing a “race mode” button to go straight to race, or having a forward and backwards option, etc.
Whilst driving, the data is all writing to a USB stick which can be loaded into the ECUMaster Data Master application on a Windows PC. This is where stuff gets really geeky, and I’ve barely even scratched the surface of it so far. Here is some data, of course from a competitive event I did previously.
On every dashboard/tab in the application you get a sidebar which has the lap list of the laps from that session:
You can select a couple at once (identified by the red and white circles next to the 1.11.1 and the 1.11.3) which will then allow you to compare those two laps on all subsequent screens.
There is an “Engine” tab which is setup similar to this, though of course is all customisable:
If you hover over a section of the RPMxLap graph in the top left, it will create cursors (one red and one white) in all the other charts to show you the data point at that particular moment.
The ‘Driver’ tab gives a bit of detail of where the time was lost or found.
This example shows that the ‘white’ lap was faster, by a fair margin almost all the way through, then threw almost all of it away at the final corner (probably due to taking a tighter line due to a car leaving the track). Once I have a full data set available to me, I’d love to track TPS and Brake Pressure inputs on this screen too.
You also get a full session breakdown of mini sector times:
Showing a virtual best, and a rolling best. This is what really showed how inconsistent I am from lap to lap. At a properly competitive event, being able to analyse this data between sessions would reap massive rewards in lap timing.
The Data Master client although in early Beta, also boasts video/overlay integration too - so looking forward to playing with that in the near future.
To summarise this is one of the favourite modifications I’ve made to any car, ever. If you want a PnP digi dash for an Elise/Exige then there are better options out there, but the fact this device is ‘car agnostic’ and I can take with me across all projects just adds to the value of it for me personally. The level of customisation is second only to the proper crazy motorsports gear at the thick end of the price range. After switching to the ECUMaster ECU in my Exige, this dash later stole the limelight and I found myself spending more time geeking out on the dash than I did the ECU, and is one of the reasons why I’m in no real rush to stick the ECU in the 211.
), but having the actual data is such a great way to improve and make track days even more fun.
