Radar Detector Displays on Center Console Screen
 

I am a proud owner of a new RX-8 car and over the past week I've been thinking of the best display for the radar detector would be. I slept on it, and in my dream it came to me. I was driving down El Toro in Lake Forest where all the cops sit with their radar guns and suddenly the car made a noise, I turned my head to the center console where the time, cd trax and temp displays and there it was on that same screen it says LASER ALERT and switched to KA ALERT with the bars indicating the strength of the laser.

How hard would it be to get the display to display there, has anyone played with the eletronics of the car yet? Would it be at all possible to get the radar detector to display there? In my dream I could only figure that it was mounted elsewhere and not on the windshield...

I want my car to do this.

It would be possible, but it would take some engineering. First, you would have to have a radar detector that would output the display that you are talking about. Escort has a remote radar detector (SR7/SRX) that has something along those lines. This would mount the antennaes up front in the grille for a stealth install (no visible equipment to catch the attention police or thieves, or to look messy).

Then you would have to find a place to mount the two switches (or find a way to integrate them into the steering wheel switches, which is also possible).

Then the difficult part would be integrating the display into the RX8 display (hoping that there are enough rows and columns, and it looks like both require 7 leds high), and figuring out a way so that it automatically switches to the radar detector when it receives a warning, and/or a way to switch it manually, and/or a way to lock it in one mode or the other.

---jps

Tapping into the display would be hardest, but switching from radar display to media display would be easy - you'd just need a gate that is triggered by the radar detector output, and is held open by a timer circuit. Not saying that I would know how to wire that up, but the concept is fairly simple. :D

Just raise shields to maximum and go to warp....

Hey, that's why starfleet never put registration plates on their starships eh?

BAH! what can be more useful is pressing a button and getting a Magic 8-ball type response on the center LCD screen...you need a question answered? press a button and the LCD screen would display, "Sure! Go for it!" or "Future is looking hazy. Ask again in a few minutes."

ok, i'm just joking of course...but i think Mazda would win points for originality and/or humor if that was in there...

mMmmm I'd pay some nice money to get this done to my car just because i had a dream about it :D :D