Currently have an MTXL Plus, and a Glowshift Boost gauge. I'll be adding a water temp, oil temp, oil pressure, and e85 content gauge. I am running a DDMWorks 3 gauge radio panel which places three gauges where the small cubby used to be.

I am looking at an A pillar setup, but was wondering if anyone has a different three pod setup? Has anyone ran a three pod setup on top of the tombstone? I am not looking to repurpose the AC vents either.

 

You are at the point that a raspberry pi (or even a tablet) dash would be way cleaner than all these gauges. Been there and done that. I'd definitely avoid A pillar gauges, they are too intrusive to your line of sight when apexing hard left handers, imo.

Here's my setup:

 

That's hot lol

Now to deep dive into this. How much did this setup run you?

 

It was sub $250 for sure. RasPi 4 cana kit was $120, touch screen $50 or so, case I think $20. I spent another $25 on a mausberry circuits controller to properly shut down the system instead of cutting power. And maybe $50 on a good enterprise level SD card. Setup was not hard at all but it would help if you have some basic Linux skills. Even without you could follow a guide to get Tunerstudio installed and setup to auto boot. Hit me up if you have any questions.

 

I'm going to start forming a shopping list to go with a setup like yours. To be frank, I was really intimidated getting the gauges set up as I don't like working with wires. Eventually, I got a fuse box setup, and now I feel comfortable wiring them up. I don't know much about Linux, but as long as there's a video out there, or instructions with pictures for reference, I'll be fine. How much harder/more involved is this?

 

I've had a similar debate back and forth in my head the past year or two for my 92 chassis. Don't have AC but still want my vents for heat or at least ambient "cool" air, and I too found 3 A pillar pods to be too obtrusive when I mocked them up, I may settle for 1 in the lower corner, max I could see reasonable is 2 but it's pushing it imo. I have a double din head unit with apple carplay that I have come to really like so I can run waze/maps while keeping phone tucked away with no cords. So no room down there to fit gauges and they're pretty far out of main vision to keep an eye on unless you have warnings programmed. Not sure if you run top up/down but I almost always have top down with no AC in New England and I've found even at max brightness screens and gauges just get too washed out from sunlight to be legible at a quick glance.

My solution was the CANchecked gauge mounted in the cluster replacing the oil pressure gauge. I highly recommend it if you have a CAN compatible ECU and like the OEM gauge cluster but just need some modern sensor readings. I thought the digital numbers/OLED in there would bother me but after a week I don't regret it for a second and I'm pretty OCD about stuff like that. Super easy to install and wire, display pretty much whatever you want to see from ECU, and also gives you some extra analog inputs so acts like an expansion board. Bit pricey but cheaper and easier than buying, mounting, and wiring a bunch of separate pods. It's well shielded from sunlight and is the easiest spot to monitor in your peripheral while keeping eyes on the road/track.

 

I thought these designs by @G3ML1NGZ were pretty great. Figured I'd throw these in here since you mentioned mounting on the tombstone. I haven't seen the widescreen RPi setup implemented in any cars, but I think that would be pretty great.

PS - Here's the thread I pulled these photos from https://www.miataturbo.net/build-thr...-85194/page15/

 

I very much like this setup. Thank you for digging this up.