The picture above shows the finished installation of the
DiGI
gear indicator.
I felt that the DiGI without the anodized aluminum case would
only look clean if mounted flush behind a flat panel, but there is no such
suitable location.
I carved the hole for the aluminum case fairly cleanly, but I still had a
little slop at the corners, so I used a sharp craft knife to cut a piece of
dark 3M Scotchlite to dress around the aluminum case.
The picture above shows the rear of the panel. The front cowling has an
aluminum frame or "stay", and the members that support the pivot for the
upper arms of the windscreen are behind those two rounded humps. There is
just barely enough room to mount the housing so that it is recessed into
the black plastic all around, but if you cut the hole in just the right
location, those frame members will be in the perfect location to support
the DiGI from behind and prevent it from falling into the cowling.
A few pieces of stiff tape are still needed to stabilize the case and
prevent it from pulling out the front. I cut some little pieces from a
left over piece from a sheet of 3M's thick, sticky-back protective clear
sheet. I also wrapped the front of the display with some relatively thick
clear plastic that had been the packaging for some product. This plastic
is especially clear, a little soft and stretchy. It gives a nice look when
the power is off, and tightens up the fit between the DiGI and the case.
Whenever doing anything of this sort it is important to remember to include
connectors in carefully selected locations in order to make final assembly
and subsequent disassembly quick and simple. If you cut corners, you will
regret it later. I had decided that standard 6-wire phone cable would make
an ideal cable to run from the cowling to the ECU. It was then a
no-brainer to use a screw-terminal - to - modular junction box as the means
to convert from the DiGI's six separate wires to the phone cable.
This
housing fits perfectly on the flat spot on the left headlight using
sticky-back hook-and-loop. I also used a 2-way, 6-wire modular coupler
under the seat so that the section of the 6-conductor phone wire that would
be soldered permanently to the wire harness would only reach a short
distance.
The picture above shows all of the cables and connectors that I used. At this
stage, it is vitally important to use a continuity tester or Ohmmeter to
verify several things. I was primarily concerned to make sure that I had
not reversed the sequence of the wires, i.e., that the red wire at the
stripped end for soldering to the wire harness was connected to the correct
screw terminal.
It is further necessary to verify that none of the wires
are connected to any of the other wires. There are exactly fifteen
possible incorrect connections (5+4+3+2+1), and they can all be confirmed
by checking for continuity between pairs of screw terminals with ALL of the
cables and connectors in place. I'm glad that I checked this because I
found more than one incorrect connection, e.g., continuity between the red
and the black wires.
I removed the 2-way coupler to see if the short was
in the longer length of wire and found that it was. I then cut off one of
the modular connectors on that wire but the short was still present so I
cut off the other one also. I needed to make certain that the wire itself
was good, so I stripped enough at one end to check for continuity between
wire pairs, for each of the possible fifteen pairings between two different
wires. I did not find any shorts, so I put new modular connectors on the
ends and tested it again, this time with no shorts.
By the way, when you make phone wires with modular connectors, if you put
the two connectors end-to-end with the spring tabs both on top, the wire
colors are supposed to match up.
The picture above shows the connections at the harness near the ECU. You
can find instructions for accessing this harness in the instructions for
the "Barbarian Jumper". The wire colors used in the 6-conductor phone wire
match the DiGI's colors with the exception of white replacing orange. The
orange training wire doesn't get connected to the harness anyway.
Here I
have attached an additional length of wire to the training wire, which you
can barely see at the bottom of the picture, and which I folded back along
the white telephone wire, which runs from under the seat, so that the
training wire will be accessible under the seat.
Only three of the six DiGI wires are actually required to be connected to
these wires at the ECU. The +12V, ground, and training wire can be
connected to any convenient location, but the cleanest approach is to run
all the wires that originate at a common location so that they all
terminate at a common location as well whenever it happens to be possible
to do this.
The wire that looks white, to which the green DiGI wire is connected, is
actually white with a yellow stripe. The wire next to it in the picture is
gray, and the yellow DiGI wire connects to it. The other sensor wire is the
neutral indicator, which is the light green wire, to which the blue DiGI
wire is connected.
This light green wire does not connect to the ECU but
as you can see, comes out of the bundle that comes from under the seat.
The black wire in the harness is a ground and the DiGI's black ground wire
can be connected to it. There are two +12V red/white wires in the harness
and either one of them can be used to connect DiGI's red wire.
An acknowledgement is in order here. Wayne Braden (Fjrtexas
from the FJROwners online forum)
went to some
effort to provide definitive answers to my questions and resolved my
uncertainties. Thanks again Wayne. Also I want to express my appreciation
again to Marc for dealing with HTML and for running the world's best
motorcycling-related Web site!
Copyright © 2003, by H. Marc Lewis and Tom Barber. All rights reserved.