With just over 82,000 miles on the Caponord, the dashboard died. Yes, while about to set off from a rather innocuous little shop car park on a hot and humid afternoon, the dashboard shuffled off its mortal coil … Curled up its toes, bought the farm – as dead as the proverbial Dodo.
On the way home I mulled over the possible cause, was it the additional microcontroller/hardware I added in 2013 or simply a failure of some part of the original Magneti Marelli circuit board? By the time I got home, I had a few possibilities rolling around my head, but nothing concrete. 15 minutes after cutting the ignition, the dashboard was on the test-bench.
Ultimately the fault was traced to a ‘Via’, a hole where a signal/power track passes from one side of the board to the other. In this case, where there should have been 12 Volts, there was 2 Volts! A simple wire link bypassed the problem and the dashboard popped back into life.
So is it a design flaw or manufacturing defect? I’d say probably a bit of both! Below is a photograph of the faulty area on a Mk1 and Mk2 board. Notice the Mk2 (right hand) has a much larger track area AND has 4 Via’s instead of the Mk1’s single Via bringing power from the top of the board to the underside. All well and good BUT both boards still only have a single Via (red dot) to pass power to the regulator on the front ……….. And it’s this Via that failed!
It seems that this was known to be a troubled area and was re-designed …. sort of. But the fact that the last Via was never upgraded, simply left this as the weak link – unfortunately, one of many on these boards!
Anyway, this one’s a runner for now ……. and that’s a jolly good excuse for a run around for an hour or two to thoroughly test it out! 😀
accommodate the twin indicator repeaters has had no impact, positive or negative. The voltmeter has been a different kettle of fish …. generally unused as the 
The second anniversary, although shorter at 6 months and a tad over 11K miles, is the 
Yes I admit it here and now, I’m doing a U-turn – a full 180° – and 
happened without the dashboard repair service. This year I opened the card and felt a twinge of regret, uneasiness, a sense that a decision I was making was the wrong one. The bottom line is that I would miss the emails/calls and involvement if I stopped something that I’ve been involved with since the beginning of unravelling the dashboard circuits.
The system I’m thinking about will, when all parameters are met (speed, revs etc) lock onto the chosen speed when the ‘Set’ button is pressed. The microcontroller will then look at the error between the chosen speed and actual speed and adjust the throttle as neccessary to try and maintain the error at zero – this is done using PID (
I switched on the fog-lights to better illuminate the mud and stone strewn road ahead; when it dawned on me that I hadn’t taken the Capo out in the dark for ages, months probably. And here I was winding a path along our troubled road and hopefully onward for a nice little night-time ride all in the name of testing the auto-dimming backlighting!
In the end I was really pleased with how the lighting worked anyway, the only change I made was to the minimum brightness – dropping it slightly – so that it’s totally readable without putting stress on my tender night-time vision. Daytime backlighting is, as you would expect fully-on at 100% while the night-time drops to 30%, which with the higher output LED’s (blue & green) is just about spot on.
I’ll start off by wishing you all a hearty 