I was recently speaking with someone about an idea that never came to mind before with me. He was thinking, as I tend to agree with custom projects, that a custom drop in plug and play manual replacement for the MFD would be handy for mainly the HVAC controls and possibly more. Mainly for me what comes to mind are the vent controls and maybe a little more with say a segmented LCD display for temp setting. Steampunk came to mind and wondering about ideas for where to inspire such thoughts so to come to fruition if this has not been done so already?
Touch screens, buttons... Everything is outdated. Real Japanese cars are controlled by the power of thought ...and the power of words.
Sounds neat, but ALL you have to do is "sniff out" the data that goes to and from the HVAC ecu on the AVC-lan bus (or maybe the BEAN bus). Then engineer a module with the switches and transceiver to do what you want. Then do the programming and troubleshooting. A few functions can be piggybacked onto the steering wheel controls, but not everything. OR, reverse engineer the I/O to the MFD cpu to translate the display & touch panel into physical controls. So it's possible, but only for someone with some advanced skills. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
