Here is my 14point7.com SLC DIY Wideband review (so I can get some free extra stuff to go with it) Even though Alan is requesting reviews and giving away extras this is my honest review of the product.
Link to product page is here: http://www.14point7.com/index.php
I will add pictures to come but I have to get some sleep tonight.
I am working on a custom dash for the charger and one of the things I never seem to be satisfied with is the selection of wideband gauges.
Manufacturers never seem to provide a nice wideband in any of their full featured gauge sets. Granted Autometer just released their digital gauge but I really don't want full digital gauges or the $260 price tag on the gague (which is also the controller) and it would also require that I buy the WB and EGT gauges separately.
I built a JAW wideband a couple of years ago when the DIY wideband craze was getting started but I never got a chance to actually use it. I recently looked up what the JAW inventor was doing these days and he had a product that was a couple of generations newer. I decided to get the updated one because there were some issues with the JAW overheating the voltage regulator that I read about and living in Arizona I just don't want to deal with it. For the price and at the time the JAW was a good deal but of course as time passes newer and better things are created.
The new product named the SLC DIY is $99 for the kit and includes a fully featured wideband controller with USB support, a nice enclosure box and even a display! The fit and finish are much nicer than the JAW was. Additionally the unit can double as an EGT and boost display aswell.
I have a disdain for gauge pods (aka cop lures) and want to panel mount the display so the EGT feature is a big added plus. It has a simple momentary push button that switches between WB, EGT, and optionally Boost. The other thing that I really like is that because it is a digital EGT it can actually read above 1600 degrees. Many times the max reading of the analog gauges is only 1600 and it isn’t high enough to really show what is going on. Some people regularly run higher than 1600 and they are SOL when looking for gauges. I don’t feel the need to see both the EGT and WB at the same time anyway as it is really something that has to be logged in most cases.
The SLC DIY assembly was quite a chore actually. I have done quite a bit of soldering dating back in the day when I got my 2 year technician degree before getting my bachelors. I have also assembled a Megasquirt and several addon boards to go with it (and of course the older JAW wideband). The SLC DIY was a lot of work and actually has more components than my Megasquirt. By the time I looked everything over to get a crude understanding of the schematics and started the work I think I had about 4 hours of soldering invested.
The components are spaced pretty tightly so you need a fine solder tip to do the work. I actually had to get a magnifier out a couple of times to make sure that I hadn't bridged connections. I didn't have any trouble with the soldering and the board clearly has a high quality solder mask on it which I didn’t burn through at any point. The solder mask was actually quite forgiving and didn’t allow any solder bridges.
The only layout related issue that I found was that the LM317 voltage regulator is very tight to a resistor leg (R8) on one side and to an electrolytic capacitor (C1) on the other. It is designed to be soldered to the board so those components need to be placed before it and even then it is a little tricky. I had to bend the legs of the regulator beyond 90 degrees and put a curve in them in kind of a weird way to get it to clear everything. It might be worth planning this out before soldering in R8 and C1. I have C1 soldered such that the can is nearly touching the board and I think that is probably just about the best way to do it.
I am going to make a simple modification to the unit and probably won't use the display board because of it. I will be using a bezel from digikey that is actually for .8" LED displays (there aren't any that properly fit the supplied .56” display). That means I have to use a different common cathode LED array. The change is pretty simple but I also wanted a green LED which is backordered so I haven't completed it yet. I will post pictures once I have completed the display modification.
Here is a link to the Bezel and display that I plan to use:
Bezel:
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/Dk...50B-ND&x=0&y=0
Smoke Lens (there are red and green ones aswell):
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/Dk...50S-ND&x=0&y=0
2 digit .8” CC displays (they don’t seem to make 4 digit displays in .8” so two will have to be used side by side. The smoke lens should make this invisible):
http://search.digikey.com/scripts/Dk...473-ND&x=0&y=0
So at any rate the SLC DIY is clearly a much more advanced unit than the JAW was and I look forward to using it as soon as the car is ready to go.
Considering that the SLC pure plus is only $160 ($61 more than the DIY kit) and comes fully assembled I might actually just buy it if I had to do it again knowing the amount of time that I spent soldering... Unfortunately the the SLC pure doesn’t seem to have the EGT which I really wanted and my desire to remotely mount the display made the DIY kit the only one that really met my requirements.
Does anyone want to buy my new in box LC-1?
-Rich
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Originally Posted by Skibbe
