So it’s 1 week before midterms begin and I’ve received my 2.2″ TFT LCD which will replace the original Audi “Driver Information Display” in my instrument cluster. The original display was a high failure item in first generation A4s and with the engine gone, it won’t be giving me any useful data anyways, so I’m replacing the entire LCD.

The idea convey the following information in a straightforward and meaningful way:

1. Battery status
   • Voltage
   • Current draw
   • Amp-hours
   • Temperature
2. Motor/controller status
   • Motor case temperature
   • Controller coolant temperature
   • Controller faults
   • Throttle position
   • Motor RPM
   • 12V voltage
3. General Information
   • Outside Temperature
   • Vehicle acceleration
   • Remaining charge time
   • Doors open

My initial thoughts are to have a main display page and 3 additional menus for specific items and to use the original wiper stalk buttons (up/down/reset) to cycle through items. Reset would cycle through the lower menu and up/down would cycle through the temperatures or other statuses depending on the menu.

The LCD I got uses an ILI9341 controller and works with the Seeeduino LCD library. The code currently just displays random numbers for the main status page and fixed numbers for the temperature. The final solution will have one Arduino collecting data, doing calculations, etc, while another will handle the display.

So far I’m happy with the look and readability of the display considering how little it cost, although it is slightly smaller than the original Audi DIS display. You can download the code here, and below is a video of the proof of concept.