Quote:
Originally Posted by TeeJayHoward
...Or am I massively overthinking/overspending this, and there's an easy and obvious solution I'm missing?
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Option 1 - Plumbing
I'd think about adding some plumbing where the factory oil temp and pressure sensors are located.
For example, remove the factory oil temperature sensor, and run some plumbing from where the factory temperature sensor plugs in over to a small vessel where you can have your sensors mounted and the factory oil temp sensor mounted.
You could do the same thing at the back of the engine with the oil pressure light switch. You would then have an outlet with a very small orifice to maintain pressure at the top of the vessel to ensure that it fills completely so the vessel fills up completely allowing for accurate temperature and pressure readings.
The outlet can run back to the breather cover or the oil tank.
The orfice would have to be very small in order to ensure that this setup does not cause a loss of system pressure.
Option 2 - electronics
Do some testing to characterize the outputs of the factory temperature and pressure sensors vs given temperatures and pressures in ohms. For example, 180F might be 90 ohms, 20psi might be 45 ohms, etc. I think you can probably find tables with this data on this forum.
Next, do some testing with your new sensors or new gauges to find out what resistance or voltages they expect so that you can build a mapping table.
Then, find an aurduino or Pi developer to write a program and fabricate the hardware to connect to the factory oil pressure and temperature sensors so that it can read the data and then output the correct voltages to the various gauges.
This setup could log the data and automatically upload it to your computer over your house wifi when the car is in your garage, etc.
You could also add additional sensors like exhaust/cat temp, oil tank temp, rpm, maybe even a knock sensor.
I think you can find someone to do this for you fairly easily on the aurdino or Pi forums.
Aside from logging and getting data from other sensors, the benefit of this is that you don't need to do any plumbing or make any changes at all to the oil flow or cooling.