Hi all, I fell onto the Arduino path for my project after hitting a dead-end with windows software. I've been reading all I can but am still very new to it.
I'm looking to use Arduino to read information from a vehicle's CAN bus network, and display it on a small screen (connected to the Arduino, no PC will be connected while it's running).
On the hardware side I've selected an Arduino Mega rev3, a Sparkfun CAN bus shield, and an inexpensive 480x320 TFT touchscreen shield that claims to be compatible with the Mega. I'm hoping these will all work together, any advice there would be much appreciated.
I've got my CANbus spec sheet, which shows me addresses and values and how they map to each of the vehicle data points. I know I'll need to filter out the pieces I want to display and convert them into base10 so they make sense to humans. End use case would be to display certain vehicle parameters on a screen next to the dashboard, so the driver can monitor various aspects.
On the software side, I'm still researching but would love to be able to build my GUI display using html/CSS if that's a feasible option. Python Bottle looks like one possible avenue. However, I'm unclear whether this would be hugely inefficient. Failing that, I'd be very open to any other kind of GUI that lets me create any kind of UI I want. It'll be largely boxes, numbers, maybe charts and a few icons/images.
Obviously I've got a huge learning curve in front of me with this, so I'd really appreciate any guidance or critique before I get started. If I'm using the wrong hardware or thinking about this all wrong, I'd definitely like to find that out as early as possible.
There are simpler off-the-shelf solutions available but none that offer the level of GUI customization I'm after. I am hoping Arduino will fill that gap.
Thank you very much for any advice here.