Knight Rider was a fav show of mine as a kid, and the car, known as KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) was the coolest car I had ever seen, besides the Delorean from Back To The Future. KITT was absolutely the inspiration for why and how I made my car talk, and 100% the inspiration for this LED display I built.
In the TV show, the car would talk to David Hasselhoff, and its voice would be visualized thought this console piece, as the KITT would speak, the LED’s would illuminate, and after watching it for so long I noticed that they moved in a very specific way.
Having been a huge fan of lots of TV shows, I even made my own TV Station, it was called Gray TV and I’d sometime broadcast episodes of Knight Rider from it.
This is my circuit – smashed by thieves.
One night some punks broke into my car, drove it to Dandenong and attempted to rip out the display from my dashboard.
However, let me explain how it works anyway. The front display has the 6x displays of 10 LEDs, and this would then connect to 2 analogue VU meters. These meters would plug into my stereo, and similar to the audio graph/display on a stereo that shows volume, these meters would output the visuals to my LED display bars. I used 2 separate VU movement because the center display was at full strength, while the outside displays we set to half level, to give the same visual treatment as the original KITT display.
I throughly enjoy creating PCBs, and while this board was damaged by vandals, it reminds me of this smily face layout that I designed on a Pong Video Game PCB.
It still makes my sad to think about what some strangers did to my Knight Rider Display Circuit. My car was old, it didn’t really have security, no just a car alarm, I mean it didn’t really have locks either, you could open with it with a butter knife, but I digress.
Look at all those poor bent over resistors and header pins, moved down in senseless violence. Luckily their counterparts in this Nixie Tube Clock that I built remain standing strong and upright.
This project was ultra fun to build, and was a really awesome part of the overall invention / project that I made for my car at the time – a talking recreation of Daytona USA.
This is one of my most recognized projects, installing all of the sound effects from Daytona USA into my car so when you’d open the drivers door, the car would announce “PLEASE SELECT A RACE COURSE”. Driving it was so much fun, especially pulling up to some traffic lights and getting the PA Speaker under the hood to loudly announce to all the cars “THREEE, TWOOO, ONNEEEE, GO GO GO!!!!”
