temperature gauge
 

don't know how i missed this before:

https://rennlist.com/forums/996-forum/827720-oil-temp-gauge-using-the-built-in-oil-temp-sensor.html

i'd looked into using the oem temp sensor to drive a gauge, but once it got beyond using a voltage divider circuit i gave up and went to a seperate vdo temp sender instead. as noted in the linked thread, this sender is not located in the best spot.

any chance fred can get a few of these arduino boxes fabbed up?

Yeah I saw that thread too but electronics is a weak spot for me (I did buy an arduino learning kit and the programming is no problem but I'm still learning the other.

That is a very cool thread though!

I have a vdo sender in the left valve cover and did a test a while back with the laptop in the passenger seat with durametric and the vdo gauge read the same as the durametric oil temp up to around 205-210'ish which is all I could get up to on the street.

I captured it with a bunch of photos but I think I lost them in a phone crash...

that's cool that the vdo sender in the head tracks temps accurately. perhaps arduino geewhizzery not required.

Yeah, I had read somewhere that oil flow wasn't good in that location and so it wasn't a good place for oil, so I did the tests.

One area where it seemed to differ was at the very low range, like below 150-160 as things are first warming up. The first time I tested the temp gauge was after cranking up the car and idling in the garage. But after taking it out and driving and getting the oil temp up to around 170-180 and up, the gauge matched the durametric oil temp.

One surprise - water temp gets up to 180 pretty quick. Oil temp takes around an extra 10 minutes at easy 3000 Rpm street driving.