digital oil pressure on inline 6, part 1

[cell]

So, I have been screwing around with microcontrollers lately, with the idea that I will eventually make a digital readout which will replace all of my gauges.

I decided to start with the oil pressure sender.

The original equipment for measuring oil pressure on my truck appears to have been a metal pressure line which goes into the cab (probably connects to the back of the oil pressure gauge).



It screws into threaded plug, which screws into the block.






I picked up an oil pressure sender from the auto parts store, but it doesn't fit. It hits the dip stick tube, and if you bend that out of the way, the body of the sender hits the block before you can thread it in.



My solution was to use a little extension pipe.




It fits just fine with the extension.




Now to test it. The sender should work as a variable resistor. At zero oil pressure, it gives zero resistance. Increasing oil pressure causes it to increase in resistance.

So I hooked up my multimeter to measure the resistance, which reads zero Ohms with no pressure.





Use a power drill to spin up the oil pump.




And viola! We get a reading!



The next step is to cobble together a microcontroller setup which reads the resistance and converts that into oil pressure, and then outputs it to a gauge or LCD readout. That's still a ways off for me yet

[67chevy2wd]

Sounds like an interesting idea you got there, make sure you keep us updated on it.