Have a Honda S2000? Use a Raspberry Pi to Add a Custom Racing-Focused Dashboard!

The Honda S2000, while sadly only produced from 1999 to 2009, is considered by many enthusiasts to be the best sports car that Honda has ever made. By some standards, it’s Honda’s only “true” sports car of the modern era, in that it’s a lightweight, open top, two-door, rear-wheel drive roadster. Like the Mazda Miata, the Honda S2000 has become very popular in amateur racing circles, particularly for autocross. Even though the most power it ever put out was 240hp, the weight and handling make it very competitive. If you’re lucky enough to own a Honda S2000, you can replicate Joel Zeller’s project to use a Raspberry Pi to add a custom racing-focused auxiliary dashboard.

This auxiliary gauge cluster will replace the stereo head unit that is normally mounted just in front of the shifter, so you will lose the ability to listen to music. It is, however, theoretically possible to tuck away a hidden Bluetooth receiver. If your Honda S2000 is a dedicated racecar, you have probably already removed the stereo anyway. This is a relatively small sacrifice to make in order to avoid having gaudy, boy racer-style gauges screwed haphazardly to your A pillar. Once installed, this gauge cluster will give you access to all kinds of useful information, including coolant temperature, intake temperature, spark advance, fuel trim, and so on. You also get handy readouts for your diagnostic trouble codes, so you’ll immediately know why the check engine light has turned on in the middle of your lap.

To complete this project, you will need a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single-board computer (though a 3B+ or a 4B would likely work too), an official 7” Raspberry Pi touchscreen LCD, a 12V to 5V converter (make sure it can handle at least 5 amps), and a generic OBDII Bluetooth adapter. Follow Zeller’s instructions to install the Raspberry Pi OS, all of the dependent software, and his code, which is based on the Kivy Python framework. Zeller doesn’t provide any information on how to actually mount the hardware, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you can figure that out on your own. About 1/3 of the LCD will be cutoff, since the S2000 is designed for a single DIN stereo, but Zeller’s interface is setup for that aspect ratio. When accessory power is turned on, the Raspberry Pi will automatically boot up and launch the dashboard while pulling data via Bluetooth from the OBDII scanner. Then you can race with the confidence that only comes from knowing exactly how close you are to blowing a head gasket.