I once had a 1987 Mazda RX-7 that I paid only $700 for. It ran, drove, turned, and stopped, but it did absolutely none of them well. I loved the Wankel rotary engine in that car, and despite a completely worn out suspension, the car felt so perfectly balanced right in the middle of a drift.

The wiring in the car had clearly been tampered with over the years. Being the inexperienced and optimistic guy that I was at the time, I decided to rip all of the factory wiring out with the intention of reworking the entire car. Needless to say, that project never happened, but I did end up learning a lot.

This gauge cluster was the best part of that project, and it was supposed to be the cluster for my never completed RX-7 project. Using an Arduino compatible Teensy microcontroller, I was able to send data from real world inputs to a Node.js server. The server was then able to host a web page and send this data to its JavaScript canvas and display it on gauges in real time.

Mostly, I just like the way it looks, but the project taught me about how to render images on screen strictly through JavaScript, and it was my first experience with pushing data to a web page in real time.