A ribbon is nothing more than a bunch of wires connected with more plastic. You should have no problems cutting them, and add a "spacer" wire to it.

 

No joy. It looks like it's soldered directly to the circuit board:

Oh well, I've reduced the size of the casing itself and moved it to the cup holder. Still working on alternatives.

 

Hey there! Although it's somewhat hard to tell just from this one picture, what you want to do is completely achievable. Although you may not like the extent to what you will have to do to reach your endgoal. I'm graduating in about a month from Purdue University in Electrical Engineering, so any more experienced engineer or technician on this board please feel free to chime in to correct me.

Without being able to look at the whole circuit board and the solder joints beneath, I can't be certain if I'm correct on this. However from that picture it looks like the LCD display is seperate from the LCD driver itself. If this is true, then relocating the LCD display from the main board will require desoldering all pins on the LCD display itself. I'm guessing there are as many as 40 pins on that thing. I would only do this if you are experienced with soldering yourself. If not then find a buddy who is. Otherwise you risk damaging the board or the components by either overheating the board/components or shorting solder joints together that weren't meant to be connected.

After that's done then you can solder the now detached LCD display to a small solder board. You can get one from Radioshack for $2. You'll also need some ribbon cable (for connecting between the main board and the LCD solder board) and pin headers which would be soldered onto the LCD solder board and the main board (where the LCD was soldered too). These headers are what you would connect the ribbon cable too.

Of course the problem is making the finished product look neat. It might work just fine on a lab bench, but will look like complete crap without some major craftsmanship going into the installation in a car (especially an S2k). This is of course all dependent on wether or not those solder points are easily located and accessible on the back of the board, which DJ Qube mentioned may not be the case.

I hope I helped in some form, and wish you luck in completing your project.

 

Thanks, Shartz, for the info. Although I'll do a clutch job, install a supercharger and dismantle a rear diff, what you just described is beyond me. I don't solder well, especially in circuit board size. I have chopped the gauge down quite a bit and have installed it in my cup holder. For now, this will do me till I find a guage that is easier to dissect.

 

[QUOTE=xviper,Mar 28 2005, 12:01 PM] No joy.

 

You may be right. When I wiggled the LCD screen, it made the display go nuts. I'm too chicken shit to yank that thing off. It's not bad the way it is now. I'm not pushing my luck.

 

You should mount it in the visor like how I mounted my V-AFC. Piece of cake.

 

My visor has been permanently immobilized due to my radar detector mount. It won't fold down anymore. Besides, I don't think I can stretch the wiring that far. I've already got it spliced to reach the cup holder.

 

Ummm... Well if you've spliced it once you can just undo that wiring and just splice on longer wire But since it doesn't really matter I guess we can forget that one...

Have you thought about cutting it into the console so you can shut the cover? You could cut the cupholder up a little and then set it up so that you can't see the display unless you open the door.

 

I should have payed more attention to the picture you showed. The rubber strips DJ Qube is referring to are called Zebra-Strips. They contain both conductive and non-conductive material. After doing some reading, it seems that this type of application requires a bezel to squeeze the display and circuit board together in order to create the electrical contact. As DJ Qube pointed out, there is no soldering involved. My previous post is completely wrong. Sorry, I wasn't trying to mislead you or anything. My experience with LCD modules is limited to my microcontoller project where we used pins to contact the LCD to the board. I have zero experience with this particular type of application, so my knowledge ends here.

I will say that having that unit in the cup holder doesn't look bad at all for a temporary solution. At least the color matches the interior.