The 60's F1 Car Returns with a V12 

Somewhere between Premiere and RU-vid I lost some audio between 6:02 and 6:15. Sorry about that everyone! It's a short explanation and rant about how difficult TPU is to print.

I’m in high school, one of the things I may go to college for is engineering. That is solely because of you and this build, thank you!

You the man Wesley! We gotta get our formula cars together!

I'd be interested to see a fleet update. You seem to have an interesting mix of vehicles. Similar to Superfast Matt, you should collab.

Always love to see practical use for 3D printing. Great video as always, and looking forward to the next two!

Welcome back, Wesley! What a wonderful series. I'm so excited to see the Kart take shape. This thing is one to pass on to your kids; it's that great of a project. Also, love the Synthwave background music.

So happy to see you back at this project, Wesley. I wouldn't be terribly disappointed to see an entire video dedicated to the equal length exhaust so we can hear the V12 scream... just saying

ALso you should strongly consider using a Teensy 4.1 and Canbus for all comms between systems on the car. I also have my ECU directly interfaced to the Teensy4.1 datalogger as well through CANbus. cuts cables down hugely and getting different systems talking to each other stops being a new problem each time.

I'm excited to see this trilogy or however many episodes it will have. I enjoy the way you share your process of testing and building. The iterations on the steering wheel add lightness!

I originally got suckered in by your mechanical logic gates. While I’m disappointed in the lack of further episodes of that this far, I’m more than impressed by the effort that you give to us on your channel and each new video you release is exciting anew! I’m a graduate mechanical engineer. Great to get inspired here!

I can't understand why this channel doesn't have more viewers/subscribers. Wesley is a very smart, innovative creator.

If you would like to use the i2c bus in higher noise environments, or environments with longer runs, I would look into a bus accelerator. Analog devices sells the LTC4311 which I have seen used to fortify i2c busses on cat 5 cable. Signals competently and reliably can be transmitted for distances over 30m. I know you've found a workaround at this point, but in case you feel like it, you could look into this. Also: I would point out that the arduino uno/micro uses an ancient 8 bit microcontroller with extremely low speed and memory resources. I highly recommend looking at the arduino zero or nano, which use a much more modern 32 bit arm microprocessor and have tons more space in them.

You're supremely underrated, keep on keeping on.

i'm an embedded software engineer, and the display is pretty dope. i've been designing a similar display for an F1 style go kart i have (made in the 70's). if you are still having memory problems, there are some tricks you can do. you can store some (or all) of the static image data like the lines in the program space using the keyword PROGMEM. if you haven't used it before, read the arduino page on it. you also want to live in the stack as much as possible, and use as few variable declarations as possible. in some cases, you can use the video memory to do calculations. if you have a chunk of video memory you know is all 0's or all 1's, you can write some math stuff in there, and then just put the 0's or 1's back when you are done (John Carmack perfected this method with Commander Keen years ago). Basically, try to avoid any alloc calls if you can, and reuse variable as much as possible. anything static, stick it in progmem. you can also usually compress your graphics a TON. i noticed you have a lot of lines , and instead of storing a bunch of 1's in memory, you can store where the line goes and how long it is. typically storing compressed data in progmem is the way i save the most space when it comes to fancy screens. you also might write your version of Wire.h that does the bit banging for I2C. you can often squeeze out some more space by doing this because the libraries have to be general purpose and often include stuff you don't need for this particular project. this goes double for screen libraries, which often have a TON of complicated and bulky code for screens that can rotate like a phone. The adafruit screen library has a huge amount of code that is useless if you don't plan on rotating your screen at all.

Anyone with a V45 Interceptor in their garage is cool. I had the 2nd one in the state of NC in 1983. Now I have someone else to follow and learn from, great channel.

Open top steering wheel AND H-pattern gearbox?? You’ll go back to the round wheel or find a paddle-sequential kit for it in no time

This is one of my favorite projects on RU-vid.

Very nice. Wow that is a lot of wires to wire through a steering wheel connector though. I did try something similar once (ended up parking it for now) but used a 6-pin mini-din in the inside of the steering shaft. Lined up so that when the steering wheel was in the correct place it would just slot in. Only used 4 pins though, gnd, +12v, CAN L and CAN H. Used a custom circuit board to use CAN with an arduino. I'd link pictures but youtube won't let me.

Post them videos!!! I’d watch them and I bet a lot of other people would too

Switch to using CAN rather than I2C. There is an arduino library available and there are plenty of shields. You can keep using the CAT5/6 cables (in fact doing so will be good if you use a pair that's twisted for CAN. It'll make the electronics side more difficult but all your data transfers will just use the serial port and it's still 2 wires. If you're building a custom board for the steering wheel you can include the CAN chips directly there anyway

Congrats on the write-up in Road and Track my man!!

Why aren't you using deutsch connectors? Also, EEPROM for storing your graphics off-chip. Cheap and easy (SPI/I2C/Serial IIRC). Also also, why not use a CAN bus? That tinsy you got supports it IIRC.

I remember seeing a Honda V-12 F1 car at Watkins Glen in 1968 or 69. What I recall is that it was, by far, the best sounding car on the track. It had those insane blending harmonics at 9 or 10 thousand RPM. Yeah, I loves me a V-12 sound.. LOL

Great to see you back! Awesome work as always!

That 83 Interceptor.... it and my same-but-in-blue one were the first real superbikes and still the prettiest to my eye.

Wes, honestly man, the only thing that rivals your amazing talent is how easily you lose interest. Not talking shit. Its just that I sincerely wish you could see what it could be like for you on the other side.

Duuuude, good to see you back. I was thinking the other day I had not seen a video of yours for awhile. It's interesting to see you are 6'2". Just a shade taller than me, so I can about how I would fit in that car. I like how you are designing it for your size.

Please post those stored videos! Would love to see them all. And great update for this mega project.

@2:47 The normal way to do this is to use the same value resistor linking adjacent legs so that your voltage divider has even steps, then put 0v on one end of the chain and 5v on the other end. For example: 0v to pin 1 1k resistor between pins 1 and 2 1k resistor between pins 2 and 3 1k resistor between pins 3 and 4 1k resistor between pins 4 and 5 1k resistor between pins 5 and 6 5v to pin 6 Signal from sweeper pin. This should give 0v at position 1 1v at position 2 2v at position 3 3v at position 4 4v at position 5 5v at position 6 If you want some error banding then you can also put a resistor inline on the 0v and 5v lines to condense the steps further. This will allow you to program an error function if either 0v or 5v is read on that input. 0v to pin 1 with 1k inline resistor 1k resistor between pins 1 and 2 1k resistor between pins 2 and 3 1k resistor between pins 3 and 4 1k resistor between pins 4 and 5 1k resistor between pins 5 and 6 5v to pin 6 with 1k inline resistor Signal from sweeper pin. This should give 0.71v at position 1 1.42v at position 2 2.14v at position 3 2.86v at position 4 3.57v at position 5 4.28v at position 6

WOW! The amount of envy and admiration I have is unreal!

Took a peek at your code. IIRC, you don't need to redraw the whole screen every loop, you can update just the parts you want to change. In other words, draw it all at the start, or when you change modes, then just update the relevant bits. Hope this helps.

Hey man! Here are some tips for printing TPU: n.1 (most effective) - use a direct drive setup. It makes printing tpu an absolute dream as it pulls the you more than pushing it through Bowden. N.2 - print slowly, usually printing at about 40-45mm/s works best, possibly slower too. N.3 - not often mentioned by high acceleration and constant flow is vital for getting good tpu prints, as the less pressure change in the nozzle with flexible filaments the better the end result. High acceleration means that there's less time spent changing extrusion amount and there is less flow / pressure change. N.4 - use high flow nozzles, they allow for more consistent extrusion of tpu as the bigger melt zone can prevent funky tpu moments. N.5 - bigger nozzles print better. A combination of a 0.8mm nozzle and a high flow hotend (phaetus rapido for example) means that you can get more plastic down quicker at the same amount of pressure, and smaller pressure changes don't effect the end extrusion amount too much. These things have helped me print flexible filaments the most, though I would definitely say that the extruder matters the most. Look up printable extruders capable of printing 70-85a TPU and they will be more than enough to print any material reliably and at speed

"Things always go to plan"...SuperfastMatt would like to have a word...

Glad to see you back!! Would love to see the lathe video you made and never shared.

Roll hoop: check out the Crosslé 90F, it might be a happy medium between your two versions. They've been using them at a driving school for 5 or 6 years and nobody died yet.

Marvelous project... congratulations, you are great!! parabens from Brazil

Awesome to see @theMountainGoats being appreciated!

Instead of TPU, have you considered printing molds and pouring up some silicone? I've done some of this, including making little silicone one-way valves like they have on the full-face snorkels. It's worked pretty well.

Another potentially useful habit to have with I2C communication, or most embedded programming, is to stay away from transmitting text whenever possible. It looks like you are sending a raw concatenated string of values that you then unpack into your various numerical values. If instead of the ASCII text you are sending as a string, you just send the value as a byte you will see something like a 2-4x decrease in the data sent. Just convert it to a string when you need to print it. For example the example string you showed on screen is 14 bytes. But if you sent the values it would be 6 bytes. (each value besides tach is a 8 bit integer value, tach could fit into a 16bit integer). Your code seems mostly fine, a lot of optimizations are not worth the hit to readability. But trading ASCII chars for integer bytes usually involves little change to the code, and often removes bottlenecks like you mentioned running into around 32 characters, so it's usually a good trade to consider.

Run it please with on board camera. Youre the man. Thank you.

Great work looking forward to the missing videos and the next installments

I don't know what shots anymore, the fact that this channel only has 165k subscribership, or the fact that you do NOT look like a Gearhead and can do things that are pretty much considered an art! Subscribed!

I wish I were even a fraction as driven and as talented as you to be able to do something like this, but it makes me very happy that people like you can concoct things like this. Great work.

Very excite you got Bobby on board for this

That is an awesome steering wheel!

I am purely impressed. Very nice project and it is well done. Full professional. Thanks for sharing and inspiring. All best to you.

You’re open-sourcing it! That’s awesome! So awesome!

Good to see you back in the garage with some new content, Wes! Suggestion on the steering wheel rotary control knobs: (I know this, because I am also building my own steering wheel for my street car, and I am trying to print circuit boards to retrofit steering wheel controls from a ~2018 Hyundai into a 1998 Trans Am) the way that the factory avoids the spaghetti, is this--Instead of running each resistor to a separate wire out (a good idea at the start), each resistor runs into the next adjacent resistor, similar to how a rotary phone works. Select item 1, and the signal goes through one resistor, and then out. Select item 2, it goes through that resistor, followed by the resistor from item 1 for a total if 2 resistors, and a different resistance value. As expected, item 9 runs through all 9 resistors before exiting the steering wheel. In this way, only 1 wire need go in, and one back out again. Hope that helps.

You should try out the Raspberry Pi Picos! They are cheaper than arduinos at the moment, faster, have more memory to work with, and you can still write and compile your arduino code for them in the IDE. Your should also check out using a CAN bus for communication, its more robust, cars have been using it for years, and I would say its just as easy to implement as I2C. Your videos are awesome and I look forward to watching your content. Keep up the amazing work!

this has got to be one of my favorite builds ever

Pumped to see this revived! Steering wheel looks good though it's so close to the rest of the dash would be easy to accidentally hit switches and stuff while turning, I know all that's gonna change anyways but yeah, something to plan, a wheel looks good in it's initial position but you have to think of ergonomics mid-turn too and not hitting anything else with your hands.

Was my guy listening to The Mountain Goats while filming? The Sunset Tree is an 11/10 album.

What really helped me print TPU was getting a filament dryer, TPU wicks up moisture really quickly from the air and creates artifacts and other print issues. I just got a cheap food dehydrator off Amazon and cut the racks until I could fit a roll of filament in there. I normally put the filament in for a couple hours before I print

you can use momentary switch on the shifter for the gearbox to send signal to the arduino. my bike (honda supra x 125) use some sort of rotary switch on the shifter, which is pretty much the same

I can’t wait for this car build. I wanted to create my own open wheel/f1 style car for the longest time, but make it the other way: instead of going back to 60s, I wanted to use as much banned tech as possible and make it modern. As I learned a few videos back, we’re the same age, so looking at your progress, I should get on it 😅

Wesley, you are hands down the most fascinating automotive youtube channel. Well done, can't wait to see this come together!!

Wow there is some amazing detail in this! I love all the 3D printing effort to detail too

Don't know a thing about mechanics and engineering, but I love these Just nice listening to a competent man doing things

9:16 "Everything is a version 1 until it's not" Lol yeah, this is the quote of the day

Ecumaster has a Can switchboard for putting switches on steering wheels, also you might look into a Sim steering wheel like the GSI Formula Pro Elite, and use a program like Sim Hub and Nextion editor for the display, btw the touchscreen could be used to cycle between pages.

For TPU: print slowly like reeeeeaaaaaaaaaaallllly slowly, no retraction, higher temp than you think/recommended, fast travel speed to reduce oozing, z-hop is recommended, loosen your extruder gears a fair bit and use a direct drive extruder if you can. Good Luck :)

I think about you from time to time... never quite remember your handle either... but you never fail to show up! Awesome stuff! Would love to see more of the car.

For good results with tpu, the best thing I’ve heard to do is get the straightest and shortest length direct drive extruder as possible. Things like ender 3’s are especially bad at tpu because of their Bowden tube setup where the filament has room to squish. Hope this reaches you and is of help 👍🏻

You’re absolutely right about printing TPU being like herding cats! If you want to get the right settings and some useful hacks I’d recommend watching videos/reading forums from the FPV community. Those guys print exclusively in TPU for impact durability and are working with very tight tolerances also.

i like the ui, but take a hint from actual F1 steering wheels and fill in the fuel/oil/temp bars so they are easy to check at a glance also the tyre heat UI could be rotated to have each corner of the screen represent a corner of the car, much easyer to quickly understand

Good to see you posting again 😀

Absolutely awesome steering wheel build. Glad someone showed that a modern looking F1 style wheel can be made at home. I think another good route that’s less time intensive, but also less cool, would be to mount an AiM dash to a steering wheel

6:00 "We're gonna talk about this spaghetti here" and absolute silence follows lol

HE's BACk!!!!!! Thank goodness, I thought you were dead.

I like you thinking thru problems, shows you are willing to try improving your build…

Great to see this project back on the front burner. I truly hope you reconsider the Top Fuel dragster roll cage and go with something a little more period-correct, just taller and braced better.

Seems to be missing audio around the 6 minute mark

The really crazy part about all this is in the end you likely could have just built a second car and kept the Boxster racer. Evolved instead so survival of the fittest I suppose! ;) Awesome video as always lots of insights.

Thanks for the update Wesley. I really enjoy keeping up with the progress on your projects.

You can use a cam lever for the rear pushrod.

Quick recommendation, to get around the printing challenges with that material, you could print yourself molds and then cast your forms with material from Smooth-On. There's also expanding foams on the market now with many density options. You could always wrap the handles with something nice like Alcantara. 👍 cool project 😎

Try a look up table, just a list of dimension for each box, circle, etc for each page. Then try to simplify the draw function, like call one function for drawing every page instead of every page being a bunch of code. Reduce reuse recycle.

12:12 Good music sounds effects on the steering wheel mounting. LOL

also, the pi pico is mostly compatible with Arduino libraries and is quite a bit faster, so you could look into that on top of loading images from the sd card to improve display speed.

Post the lathe video and the ones like it please. Great to have you back!

Good to have you back! Hope you give us an update on all the projects

Nice to see you back. Too bad to hear about all the videos you've made and then decided not to post. I'm sure those would've been very interesting, even when not edited to perfection.

Bit pack your data. Use shielded TTL at 57600 baud, this works up to 3 meters. Since the mega has 3x extra TTL ports, you can get 3 nanos into 1 mega controller at high speed.

It’s awesome. Keep the updates coming. I don’t care if the video production isn’t “up to snuff” I just wanna see content. Love it.

You can amplify the I2C signal using a transistor and your 12V signal! super common thing for harnesses.

i'm so stoked you're back! thanks for sharing!

I was just thinking about your projects a couple days ago. So glad to see you posted!

I appreciate your editing, stoked to see how everything goes

Cat6 is not "one better" than Cat5, it's simply for a different purpose - ducted runs in buildings. It has a stiffened insert, and a less-forgiving wire formulation, which together give it a minimum bend radius to guarantee proper function. Cat5 (the current up-to-date revision of which is Cat5e) carries the same signals at the same speed and quality, but is designed to be flexible; the tradeoff is maximum length. While I'm sure Cat6 will do the job of scrunching up inside the steering wheel and carrying some analogue voltages to and from an Arduino just fine, Cat5 is much better-suited to doing so. Shielded Cat5 probably even more so!

Thanks for sharing, happy that you are back.

We most definitely did use Jack stands, floor jacks, zip ties and duct tape when prototyping R8 exhausts, but ours weren’t the fancy Ti $50k exhausts, just the plain 304 $20k ones

Great to have you back on RU-vid. Looking forward to follow the ongoing work

Awesome project, welcome back !

Having watched too many videos of Matra V12 engines from the 1960s, I am now convinced that I need to somehow build my own V12 (probably from several motorcycle engines) to get that turbine like shreik in some sort of hifalutin replica.

For running the length of the car, try RS485 instead of i2c, if you can.

For displays have you looked at nextion? 4 wires & has it's own controller so graphics are all done on a cpu... that's what I've used for v1 of my Arduino driven gauge cluster and am happy with it. This will 100% solve your memory issue and give you alot more options for graphics. Cheers from the east valley

There's some great ideas in this reboot, the trick is to finish it rather than constantly iterating individual parts. Thanks for sharing Wesley, I'm looking forward to seeing the build progress!

Right on Wesley! Happy for you mate keep it up 💪🏽🏁

So cool to see you do a project similar to what I've been working on, as far as the arduino and screen go, Been working on an oil temp and pressure on a similar Nextion 320x480 screen. Not sure if their GUI works with the Adafruit, but the Nextion Editor program is super helpful on creating those graphical backgrounds. Looking forward to the next couple videos of this!

You can get good results with tpu. I have a Bowden setup and adding a PTFE guide inside the extruder stepper to constrain the filament made the biggest difference. I also dropped the retract setting down to absolute minimum.