Does the Mpguino turn off
 

Hi all, just a simple question just put the mpguino in the 94 metro today, work nice, just need to get it calibrated , my question is, does the display turn off, adjusting the microseconds just turns off the backlight after how ever many microseconds i put in, will it drain the battery if i dont drive the car for a week or 2, ohh and i want to thank you all esp DCB, i was gonna give up alot of times with this project, but it was worth all the effort, keep up the good work

The display does not normally turn off, just the backlight. If you unplug the mpguino, then it will turn off, but the tank information (miles driven, gallons used) will be erased. I believe the calibration information will still be there, but I'm not positive.

The power that it uses when the backlight is off is very little, I left my car off with the mpguino plugged in for about a week and a half in the middle of winter, and it started up just fine when I got back to it. There have been reports of people having their battery drained from leaving it sitting for a long time, so I guess it depends on the condition of your battery. Mine is pretty new, so I'm sure that helped. If you're worried about it, the safe thing to do would be to unplug it.

I will be installing mine this week and am wondering what to expect. Does the backlight turn off after a particular timeout of no signals or something? I am using the white on blue LCD.

One thing that I can see being an annoyance to me is night driving. I hate bright lights glaring at me from within my car, I keep my dash lights dimmed very low.

Is there a particular line I can switch or put a pot onto to be able to dim the backlight with this LCD? Maybe even a CDS cell to automate it based upon ambient light.

As a last alternative I guess I could make a tinted plastic shield I could place over the LCD at night.

thanks very much, just for the heck of it, i tested it and it draws roughly 20 milliamps, so i guess we all know now

junker, the backlight does turn off after a timeout period. The default is set to 7 minutes, and you can change it in the same menu that you change the VSS and microsec/gallon settings. I changed mine to 3 minutes (18000000 ms).

There are also a few different brightness settings that you can scroll through while the mpguino is running by pressing the center button. The values can be changed in the code, or you can try the default values and see how well they work, because it varies with different LCD's.