Cataclysm-dda: Dashboard consumes more power than aisle lights

Created on 19 Jan 2020  路  3Comments  路  Source: CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA

Despite producing much less light.

Vehicles stale

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I imagine a dashboard does a lot more than just producing light. Actually, I imagine the light produced is just a byproduct of what it's actually doing, which is processing all the various instrumentation and displaying them on a screen. Sensible for that to consume more power than effectively an LED light

edit: Was curious so I did a bit of research. I'm no expert on the subject so feel free to do corrections.
Here's a power reference by Texas Instruments for an instrument cluster of a car dashboard. I put the numbers here into a watt calculator: total 2 amp and 12v equaled to 24 watts, which is roughly around what the current power consumption of dashboard (-25). This is _before_ the backlighting for the panel.

Looking around, a car instrument cluster could have anywhere from half a dozen to two dozen or so small bulbs for lighting, most of them 1.2 watt each, with a handful of bigger bulbs up to 3 watt each. For an LCD solution, this is what I found, which is around the same power draw as the cluster itself before you attach the lcd screen to it. This is for supporting a fairly large screen, but I imagine if the whole dashboard is LCD it'll be around the same dimensions . Most cars I see these days, including my own, have a mix of bulbs and LCD.

In summary, if based on my findings, the dashboard should actually be using up even more power than it does now.

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I imagine a dashboard does a lot more than just producing light. Actually, I imagine the light produced is just a byproduct of what it's actually doing, which is processing all the various instrumentation and displaying them on a screen. Sensible for that to consume more power than effectively an LED light

edit: Was curious so I did a bit of research. I'm no expert on the subject so feel free to do corrections.
Here's a power reference by Texas Instruments for an instrument cluster of a car dashboard. I put the numbers here into a watt calculator: total 2 amp and 12v equaled to 24 watts, which is roughly around what the current power consumption of dashboard (-25). This is _before_ the backlighting for the panel.

Looking around, a car instrument cluster could have anywhere from half a dozen to two dozen or so small bulbs for lighting, most of them 1.2 watt each, with a handful of bigger bulbs up to 3 watt each. For an LCD solution, this is what I found, which is around the same power draw as the cluster itself before you attach the lcd screen to it. This is for supporting a fairly large screen, but I imagine if the whole dashboard is LCD it'll be around the same dimensions . Most cars I see these days, including my own, have a mix of bulbs and LCD.

In summary, if based on my findings, the dashboard should actually be using up even more power than it does now.

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