A Game Boy Speedometer, just because you can.
The “world’s worst digital dash”, a Nintendo Game Boy as a digital speedometer. Interfacing the handheld with the vehicle’s CAN bus system, this project has something to offer.
Check my Image Description’s
![Months of work have gone into decoding the Game Boy’s data bus and creating a schematic for the interface board. Tricking the Game Boy into thinking it was loading a game, while actually displaying incoming speed data. The screen’s low resolution and slow refresh rate rendered it barely readable in a moving vehicle. But [John]’s goal wasn’t practicality — it was just proving it could be done.](https://nerdculture.de/system/media_attachments/files/114/251/391/317/762/186/original/f1ea811e6cb4c4c3.jpeg "Months of work have gone into decoding the Game Boy’s data bus and creating a schematic for the interface board. Tricking the Game Boy into thinking it was loading a game, while actually displaying incoming speed data. The screen’s low resolution and slow refresh rate rendered it barely readable in a moving vehicle. But [John]’s goal wasn’t practicality — it was just proving it could be done.")
![[ImageSource: John Sutley]
Showing real-time vehicle speed on the Game Boy sounds like it should be relatively easy, but the iconic game system wasn’t exactly built for such a task. Its 2 MHz CPU and 160×144 pixel dot-matrix screen were every kid’s dream in 1989, but using it as a car dashboard is pushing it. To bridge that gap, [John] designed two custom circuit boards.
One interfaces with the Game Boy, intercepting its memory requests and feeding it data from a microcontroller. The other processes the CAN bus signals, translating speed information into a form the Game Boy can display. [John] used inexpensive tools and software to read the CAN bus data, and used GBDK-2020 to write the software in C.](https://nerdculture.de/system/media_attachments/files/114/251/392/340/955/496/original/f54a186d63357559.png "[ImageSource: John Sutley]
Showing real-time vehicle speed on the Game Boy sounds like it should be relatively easy, but the iconic game system wasn’t exactly built for such a task. Its 2 MHz CPU and 160×144 pixel dot-matrix screen were every kid’s dream in 1989, but using it as a car dashboard is pushing it. To bridge that gap, [John] designed two custom circuit boards.
One interfaces with the Game Boy, intercepting its memory requests and feeding it data from a microcontroller. The other processes the CAN bus signals, translating speed information into a form the Game Boy can display. [John] used inexpensive tools and software to read the CAN bus data, and used GBDK-2020 to write the software in C.")
Chromium on Android: How we gained a 2x speed up on Speedometer benchmark
by Eric Seckler.
Will dive into build optimizations and their impact on CPU bottlenecks, discuss the relevance of benchmarking end-to-end user journeys, and how they built a novel page load benchmark to allow optimizing across the software/hardware stack.
Live stream:
https://live.fosdem.org/watch/ua2220
A Game Boy Speedometer, Just Because You Can - From a practical standpoint, [John] may be correct that his recent creation is the... - https://hackaday.com/2025/01/15/a-gameboy-speedometer-just-because-you-can/ #nintendogameboyhacks #speedometer #carhacks #nintendo #can-bus #gameboy #gameboy #canbus #pcb
Train Speed Signaling Adapted For Car - One major flaw of designing societies around cars is the sheer amount of signage t... - https://hackaday.com/2024/09/11/train-speed-signaling-adapted-for-car/ #transportationhacks #reverseengineering #powersupply #speedometer #indicator #signaling #boston #obd-ii #speed #train #mbta #car #gps #led
Tech in Plain Sight: Speedometers - In a modern car, your speedometer might look analog, but it is almost certainly di... - https://hackaday.com/2024/08/22/tech-in-plain-sight-speedometers/ #transportationhacks #eddycurrents #speedometer #history
An ESP Makes A Bicycle Odometer - If you’d like to measure the speed of your cycling then it’s easy enough to buy a ... - https://hackaday.com/2024/08/07/an-esp-makes-a-bicycle-odometer/ #microcontrollers #speedometer #cycling #esp8266
I tried a #snapdragonXElite #surface #laptop at Best Buy, and ran BrowserBench.org on it.
#Microsoft #Edge scored 24 on #SpeeDOMeter 3, that's faster than #Chrome on my #AMD #Ryzen 9, with a #Radeon 6900 and 64GB of RAM.
I know what CPU my next laptop is going to have!
GPS at Any Speed - [Mellow_Labs] was asked to create a GPS speedometer. It seems simple, but of cours... - https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/gps-at-any-speed/ #arduinohacks #speedometer #gpshacks #gps
I'm a web perf nerd, so I install every browser I can find and run all the benchmarks on https://browserbench.org on a regular basis.
I notice that (on Windows 11) Firefox is much better at Speedometer 3.0 than it was on 2.0.
It's scoring as well as Chrome most of the time, and outperforms Opera and Edge handily.
It still sucks at Jetpack 2.1 and MotionMark 1.3 though.
@Vivaldi is coming out on top right now!
#speedometer 3.0 has been released, what's your score? 
Speedometer 3.0: benchmark di nuova generazione per misurare le prestazioni dei browser. Sviluppato da Apple, Google, Microsoft e altri, include test su framework popolari e simula carichi di lavoro reali per un'esperienza web più fluida. #Speedometer #benchmark #webperformance
Google, Apple та Mozilla випустили Speedometer 3.0 — бенчмарк для браузерів https://itc.ua/ua/novini/google-apple-ta-mozilla-vypustyly-speedometer-3-0-benchmark-dlya-brauzeriv/ #Speedometer #НовиниСофт #Firefox #Mozilla #Новини #Google #Apple #Софт
#Thorium release party going on!
Let's celebrate over 600 #speedometer points on a Mac M3 Pro #webperf
https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-MacOS/releases/tag/M119.0.6045.214
Car's in the shop. Rental is a #volkswagen #Jetta. Not bad. But this #speedometer is just making every last nerve twitch not being linear. Where is 90? Aaarrrg!
#SunSpider is a #JS benchmark that was created more than a decade ago to measure JS engine #performance. It's a collection of pretty bad and outdated micro-benchmarks. 
Our team is focusing on more representative workloads such as #Speedometer and we're making great progress there! You can read more about this work in our latest newsletter on https://spidermonkey.dev
That said, SunSpider is still tracked in CI to watch for regressions and it's nice to see it's still improving too! 
Tested for you (and me 
) today: These bike safety flags survive 50 km/h (downhill on tarmac) although the fibre pole bends heavily as I could see in the rearview mirror. (And I had lot of fun, including two serpentines. 
)
In other news: I also fixed the #speedometer of my #KMX #recumbent #trike yesterday. 
) 
| R.I.P Natenom 