- When you modify a car, you
eventually need to be able to monitor a bunch of engine vitals. Obviously you can just add
some gauges, which we've done, we've added a few gauges
to the Miata already, but when you wanna keep an eye on a lot of stuff, what do you do? You just add a bunch of gauges,
maybe some on the A-pillar. Yeah, I mean, I guess that works, but in the case of the Miata
space is already so tight and my visibility is
already pretty obstructed. I don't wanna do that. But I do wanna keep an
eye on a lot of stuff. So what do I do, well today
I'm gonna be pulling out the old analog gauge cluster and replacing it with a digital dash that should let us keep an eye on anything that the Megasquirt can see. So it should be really sweet, as long as we can get it installed without looking too junky,
and I think we can do it. I'm Zach, and this is Money Pit, let's get digital. (upbeat music) - A big thanks to Lords Mobile for sponsoring today's episode. You know I'm always looking
for ways to kill time while Zach Jobe helps me out on my truck while my shoulder heals. Hey Jobe, how you doing buddy? - [Jobe] Almost done here Jerry. - Okay, thanks. I'll keep helping out up here. (jackpot sounds) I've been getting into more SLG games and one of my go-tos is Lords Mobile. It is a top mobile game
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iPhone 12. (air horns blows) Yeah, you're welcome. All you have to do is click
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in the might rank section can win one iPhone 12 each, and you can increase your might by building your kingdom and leveling up, and you can even spin the lucky wheel for your chance to win
one of the iPhone 12s and a bunch of other awesome prizes every time you upgrade your castle. - [Narrator] So click the
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an iPhone 12 and cash. Plus a special $350 Lords Mobile gift pack will be automatically
offered to all participants after downloading the game. - Jobe, what is taking so long? (footsteps recede) (rolling) That explains a lot. - [Eddie] You know what that looks like. It looks like one of them,
digital picture frames. - Oh yeah, it kind of does look at Nolan. So here's what we got. This is a 12.3 inch wide screen
digital dash from DD-EFI. It is pretty sweet. It's built to be plug and
play with the Megasquirt, so we'll be able to see
anything on the Megasquirt. This is almost just
like a computer monitor. I'll be able to tune from
this screen too if I want to. It's also got its own GPS for speedometer, which is also quite nice. Now, temporarily, I'm gonna
lose the functionality of my fuel level gauge
and my oil pressure gauge, which I'm not okay with long-term but I can get that stuff
plugged into the Megasquirt and then I'll be able
to see it on this dash, that's just another
project for another day. But the real trick is gonna be
getting this thing installed in the area that the old gauges were. This thing is A, really big
and B, not meant to go there. So it's gonna be a little bit
tricky to get this installed in a way that looks decent, in a way that doesn't keep me up at night. So that is gonna be the hard part but I think we're going
to be able to do it. (upbeat music) All we're gonna have to
do is pull out the screws that hold the gauge cluster
in and disconnect it. We're also gonna take
off this little cover off the steering column right here, just another couple of screws. Pretty much everything in
the interior of the Miata is held together by
just a couple of screws. Okay. Oh yeah, gauge screw. So you remember a long time ago when we were at the racetrack, all my gauges would shut off repeatedly. Well, that's the thing with the Miata. And even if everything's
working correctly, if you over rev it, sometimes
the gauges will pop anyway which has happened to me since. Since we're gonna be
installing this digital dash, it's no longer gonna be on that circuit and it's no longer
gonna do that ever, so-- I caught a 13 incher baby,
two and a half pounds. All right. So this thing is pretty
big and it's even bigger with this universal 3D printed
bezel that it comes with. I wanna be able to
re-install this at the end. Now this one specifically is super broken in pretty much every way, but I'm gonna use this one to test for this and get everything done, cause I know I'm gonna need to trim this. So obviously it's not gonna work as is, it's not gonna work with this big bezel. And I think that we've
got some depth issues too with just how thick this is. So I think we're gonna
have to take matters into our own hands. Kind of take this thing apart
and dismantle it a little bit and put it back together in
a way that fits hopefully. - [Eddie] Hopefully. - Hopefully. (upbeat music) All right. So now we've got the screen
itself removed from the guts, let's go kind of lay this in the dash and see if this thing itself will fit. Looks like if I can mount that there, the cover will go back on I think. Now it's nice we've got all
these little threaded standoffs, so I should be able to use these to mount it one way or another. I think if I just make some tabs, I'll be able to use the
original mounting locations for the original gauges. Oh yeah. I think that's gonna work just fine. So now let's get the screen out of here and start working on wiring. Basically we're gonna
need to find a source of constant 12 volts, a
source of ignition 12 volts and a source of like door open
12 volts and then a ground. Then we've just got to
run a USB cable back to the Megasquirt, pull
out the old multi-meter and figure out where
to wire this thing in. (upbeat music) Okay, so I think we've got a plan. I'm gonna use the old
harness from the door buzzer that I disconnected a while back. So this has both ground and it
has a switch 12 volt source, so when I turn the key on
12 volts shows up right here and I've got the ground that
I can use, which is great. Then I just need a
constant source of 12 volts which I'm gonna take from
the dome light over there. So now at this point, all I
got to do is make a few jumper wires to go from where I'm taking power from to the dash. I'm just kind of roughly
estimating the length that I need these to be, I'll chop them, and then I'll turn them to be
perfect once I get them in. But this is the kind of
thing I'm gonna start a little bit long and then
dial it in once I install it. (upbeat music) Plenty of that super good measuring. Okay, now let's go get
these put in the car and then we're one whole step closer. So plug our little jumpers
right into this harness. We should have ground,
ground and 12 volts. All right. So we got 12 volts, the
key on and we got ground so now we just need to
get that constant 12 volts which we're gonna pull from over there. We're almost there. All right. So we're fishing this power
wire from the passenger side to the driver's side,
which can be a huge pain if you don't have a
piece of metal like this. This is a piece of welding
rod I brought from home, but you can use a straightened
out wire, coat hanger, or you know, whatever, a stick
that you found in the yard. Anything that makes this
easier is your friend. (upbeat music) Okay, so now we've got our
jumper wires in the car. So now I'm just fishing
them up to where the dash is gonna go, then I'll cut them to fit and then I'll splice on the jumper that actually goes into the dash. And then all the real wiring is done. All right. So now we've got our jumper wires strung up to where the dash is gonna go, we've got our dash harness. If that's what you wanna call it, ready to connect to these, so all I'm gonna do is connect them. (upbeat music) All right, so now that's placed all we need to do is run
our USB extension cable and mount our little GPS thingy. Okay, so that was real easy. Now, what was the other thing? Oh yeah, the USB thing. I had to go to a mall
yesterday, it was weird. (cat meows) Okay, so this is basically
just gonna bridge from the Megasquirt to the dash. So I'm gonna pop out the
center console real quick because I'm gonna go up
under and then up to the back and I'm gonna have it hanging out back between the seats somewhere. So let's get the center console out. You know, it's not a day
of working on the Miata if you don't have to at least
take out the center console. (upbeat music) All right. Now we've got to throw this back together. Yeah, I mean, not too bad, could have trimmed a little
more of that wire off but we'll just tuck it back there, just like that and we'll
never see it again. (upbeat music) All right. Well, it's not that easy
to put in with Allen key, but it is in, and I think it's gonna work and it actually looks pretty
good and it is quite sturdy. So let's see if we can
get this thing working. Okay, so it's the moment of truth. I'm just gonna turn the key
on and see what happens. I'm kind of interested to
see what this looks like, I have no idea what, what to expect. Hopefully it looks cool. Hopefully it works. Is the fan making any noise? (laughs) Flames bro. Wow. So it pretty much just
kind of looks like windows. So I'm gonna be able to
configure these gauges in any way you can configure
gauges on Megasquirt. Let's see if we can get
this thing hooked up to our, our keyboard. Okay, after a little
bit of fiddling around and having to go find a USB
drive, we got it working. It's connected to the Megasquirt and I think it's gonna be pretty sweet. So right now we're just looking
at kind of the traditional Megasquirt screen, the standard gauges, and you can see it's connected,
it's actually working. Hey, not bad. And then obviously all this
is configurable I'm sure. Ooh. The amber LED, dang! This is nitride or this thing is sweet. Man, okay, all right. Well, I don't wanna get too sucked into just playing with this
right now because as easy as it would be to do
that, we're not done yet. Still have to trim the old gauge cover up to make it fit with the new gauge. So I'm gonna use this old junky one, get it trimmed up and get it
flush with our new screen. Should look good. (upbeat music) Yeah, that aught to do it. That's should hold that in place for now. It looks real nice too. All right, before we go drive this thing I wanna get this dash kind of set up so that we're looking at all
the vitals that we care about or at least what we can access for now. So I'm gonna customize
our dash a little bit and then we'll go drive it. All right, so just from the factory, this kind of comes with
some random stuff up here. So I've just gone ahead
and put some things that I care about on the screen. Like we've got our vacuum
and our boost up there now, we've got throttle
position, air fuel ratio, intake air temp, our battery
voltage, coolant temp and obviously we've got
miles per hour and RPM. There are dozens and dozens
if not hundreds of options of things that I can look
at, which is really nice. You know, if I need to monitor anything all I gotta do is go
click on it and look at it rather than install yet another gauge. So this is really starting to seem like it is pretty worth it. So I think I'm gonna
full screen this thing and take it for a spin. (engine revs) You know, I can't lie, this
makes me feel kind of cool. Look at all my gauges,
look at all my data. Look at all the things
that I know about my car. That's how you know that
I'm really a car guy, because I can monitor all the
things going on in my car. Obviously that said, I can't
yet monitor my fuel level or my oil pressure, but the nice thing is
with this digital dash is that now whenever I plug any of those sort of engine vitals into the Megasquirt, I can just easily look at them. And that's a pretty streamlined process. The Megasquirt is easy
to plug things into, and now that I have this digital dash it's really easy to look at them. So honestly, I was a little bit skeptical about this one in terms of
how it would look at the end, and now granted with all this masking tape it's a little hard to imagine,
but if you can imagine without the masking tape, I
think it's gonna look sweet and it certainly is functional. It's really nice to have all these gauges and I'm really excited
to be able to do more with the Megasquirt. I think that this makes it easier for me to spend some more time
messing with the Megasquirt. So in my opinion, this is worth it. If you're modifying your car to the point that you really started to need to be able to
keep an eye on things, absolutely go with the digital dash. I can't wait to get the new
gauge cover in from Mazda, and once I do, I'll trim
it up, make it match, you know this one and
we'll be in business. So thank you guys so much for watching us install this digital dash and bring the Miata into the 21st century. Don't forget to follow
me on Instagram @zackjobe and follow Donut @donutmedia. I'll see you guys next Wednesday. (car engine revs) - Oh, oh-ho dark mode
Jobe, what's going on man. Long time no see. - Ooh. (falls) He looks so cool. Hey, ooh, man he did look cool. - Everybody can look as
cool as dark mode Jobe just by going to donutmedia.com to check out our new limited
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mode boost creeps T-shirt, one of my personal
favorites, not reflective, so you can get away with some
sneaky stuff in the dark. There's also a hat, right? - [Man] We don't have it yet. - Okay, well apparently it's
so dark you can't even see it. Limited edition Donut stickers,
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