Autometer Nexus Gauges help
 

I have Racing Beat's gauge pod and want to put the Nexus Gauges in it. I'm going to put the water/oil temp and oil pressure I was talking to Jim at Racing Beat about it and this is what he sent me:

"It is my understanding that the Nexus system uses information that is being supplied on the CAN BUS from the various sensors that monitor various engine parameters. In order words, each sensor on the car is feed into a "loop" that feeds information back to the the ECU. The ECU then takes this information and sends the appropriate information out to a dashboard gauge or light. You can also access this information via the OBD II port, which is apparently how the Nexus system gathers the data for the gauges.

However, on the RX-8 Mazda has not included an oil pressure or oil temperature sensor on the engine. Therefore, there is no information being sent to the ECU. Mazda did include an oil pressure switch which will activate at around 5 PSI. This will supply information to the ECU that there is at least 5 PSI of pressure, but it does not provide any type of linear data reading that can be used to operate a gauge.

I hope this makes sense, let me know if I am wrong with regards to how this Nexus system works."


From what I've seen with them, each gauge is daisy chained in series to the Nexus Sensor Module which then has inputs for the sensor for each gauge and the ECU isn't involved anywhere. Looking at the install instructions on Autometers website also looks like this is the case.

I just want to make sure that I'm getting the right gauges before I spend a ton of money.

Jim has no clue about what he's talking about...

I'm pretty sure its like the Defi system where the instrument/sender gets hooked up to a datacollecter/controller and then wired up to the guage (but I may be wrong on that as I don't own this setup) - either that or they are just ordinary electronic guages that wire up directly to the sending unit. Either way, it has no way of reading the OEM CAN bus.

now I understand why RB is using the guages they picked...

The Nexus gauges all have their own sensors that must be installed. They plug into the control unit and then the gauges are daisy-chained together.